In Annals of Botany

Authors: Valenzuela, Francisco Jose; Reineke, Daniela; Leventini, Dante; Chen, Christopher Cody Lee; Barrett-Lennard, Edward G.; Colmer, Timothy D.; Dodd, Ian C.; Shabala, Sergey; Brown, Patrick; Bazihizina, Nadia

Abstract

Background
Soil salinity, in both natural and managed environments, is highly heterogeneous, and understanding how plants respond to this spatiotemporal heterogeneity is increasingly important for sustainable agriculture in the era of global climate change. While the vast majority of research on crop response to salinity utilizes homogeneous saline conditions, a much smaller, but important, effort has been made in the past decade to understand plant molecular and physiological responses to heterogeneous salinity mainly by using split-root studies. These studies have begun to unravel how plants compensate for water/nutrient deprivation and limit salt stress by optimizing root-foraging in the most favourable parts of the soil.

Scope
This paper provides an overview of the patterns of salinity heterogeneity in rain-fed and irrigated systems. We then discuss results from split-root studies and the recent progress in understanding the physiological and molecular mechanisms regulating plant responses to heterogeneous root-zone salinity and nutrient conditions. We focus on mechanisms by which plants (salt/nutrient sensing, root-shoot signalling and water uptake) could optimize the use of less-saline patches within the root-zone, thereby enhancing growth under heterogeneous soil salinity conditions. Finally, we place these findings in the context of defining future research priorities, possible irrigation management and crop breeding opportunities to improve productivity from salt-affected lands.

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In SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

Authors: Pedrero Salcedo, Francisco; Perez Cutillas, Pedro; Alarcon Cabanero, Juan Jose; Vivaldi, Alessandro Gaetano

Abstract

The global water crisis, driven by water scarcity and water quality deterioration, is expected to continue and intensify in dry and overpopulated areas, and will play a critical role in meeting future agricultural demands. Sustainability of agriculture irrigated with low quality water will require a comprehensive approach to soil, water, and crop management consisting of site- and situation-specific preventive measures and management strategies. Other problem related with water quality deterioration is soil salinization. Around 1Bha globally are salinized and soil salinization may be accelerating for several reasons including the changing climate. The consequences of climate change on soil salinization need to be monitored and mapped and, in this sense, remote sensing has been successfully applied to soil salinity monitoring. Although many issues remain to be resolved, some as important as the imbalance between ground-based measurements and satellite data. The main objective of this paper was to determine the influence of environmental factors on salinity from natural causes, and its effect on irrigated agriculture with degraded water. The study was developed on Campo de Cartagena, an intensive water-efficient irrigated area which main fruit tree is citrus (30%), a sensible crop to salinity. Nine representative citrus farms were selected, soil samples were analysed and different remote sensing indices and sets of environmental data were applied. Despite the heterogeneity between variables found by the descriptive analysis of the data, the relationship between farms, soil salinity and environmental data showed that applied salinity spectral indices were valid to detect soil salinity in citrus trees. Also, a set of environmental characterization provided useful information to determine the variables that most influence primary salinity in crops. Although the data extracted from spatial analysis indicated that to apply soil salinity predictive models, other variables related to agricultural management practices must be incorporated.

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In HYDROLOGICAL SCIENCES JOURNAL-JOURNAL DES SCIENCES HYDROLOGIQUES

Authors: Liebhard, Gunther; Klik, Andreas; Stumpp, Christine; Nolz, Reinhard

Abstract

Stable isotope techniques can be used to investigate evapotranspiration and its partitioning into evaporation and transpiration. However, verification is often difficult due to missing information about actual evapotranspiration. Therefore, in this study a methodology tested for laboratory conditions was modified for field applications. Evapotranspiration, which was determined by weighing lysimeters, and isotope techniques were combined with soil water and lysimeter measurements to calculate evaporation and transpiration rates of soybean under natural conditions. The case study was conducted in 2019 in Groß-Enzersdorf, Austria. The results show that the methodology was suited to measure actual variations of evaporation and transpiration ratios, even during dry periods. Weekly evaporation (0.5–2.2 mm d−1) and transpiration (1.3–4.3 mm d−1) rates as well as the respective ratios (transpiration 43–85%) agreed with the results of numerical modelling and values from the literature, confirming the applicability of the modified methodology for portioning evapotranspiration in the field.

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In INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Authors: Istanbuly, Mustafa Nur; Krasa, Josef; Jabbarian Amiri, Bahman

Abstract

Most studies that address the relationship between socio-economic characteristics and soil erosion focus on the effects of soil erosion on socio-economic conditions at different levels, from global to smallholder. Few, if any, efforts are made to address the influence of socio-economic variables on the soil erosion rate as an indicator of landscape degradation. The present study was carried out using spatial data from 402 catchments that cover Poland, to find out how socio-economic variables, which include area-weighted average income per capita (PLN km−2), area-weighted average gross domestic product (PLN km−2), population density (person km−2), and human development index can drive the soil erosion rate (kg ha−1 yr−1), along with annual precipitation, soil and geomorphological variables that include soil organic carbon content, soil water content, clay ratio, stream gradient, and terrain slope. The results showed that the soil erosion rate is indirectly driven by the socio-economic variables in the study catchments, as it is alleviated by increasing population density, the area-weighted average gross domestic product, and the human development index. Furthermore, analyzing the incremental relationship between soil erosion rate and the area-weighted average of socio-economic variables revealed that no uniform change can be observed in the relationship between the area-weighted average socio-economic variables and soil erosion in the study catchments.

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In 2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON METROLOGY FOR AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY (IEEE METROAGRIFOR 2021)

Authors: Jerabek, Jakub; Zumr, David; Dostal, Tomas; Tenreiro, Tomas R.; Strauss, Peter; Vaverkova, Magdalena D.

Abstract

Soil hydraulic properties (SHP) can be affected by many different factors including: management practices (tillage practices, crop residue management), land use, or natural phenomena (fires, intensive rainfall, drought). Changes in SHP may have a negative impact on infiltration, soil water balance or plant water availability. Although changes of SHP caused by tillage or fires have been vastly studied, such studies are usually restricted to a specific area or do not study the subsequent effects of the changed soil on water movement. In this paper, we present a modelling case-study of the intra-seasonal soil water dynamics at several locations that were subjected to topsoil changes due to tillage management or fire. The effects of no-tillage (NT), minimum, reduced, or other types of non-conventional (alternative) tillage (AT), mulch application (MU), and fire (BURNED) were compared with the effects of conventional tillage (CT) on the soil water dynamics. The changes in SHP due to tillage practices and fire were obtained from the literature. All management practices and fire effects were tested using numerical simulation at three European catchments. According to the literature review, compared to CT, the MU and BURNED treatments affected soil hydraulic properties significantly. NT and AT also influence them, but to a lesser extent. The results of this modelling exercise replicate the effects of tillage on the SHP. The most persistent positive effect on soil water dynamics was under MU treatment. The effect of NT and AT were site specific, suggesting that these results must not be generalized or extrapolated without cautious considerations on the local conditions. BURNED exhibited the most negative effect on soil water dynamics in most cases.

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In 2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON METROLOGY FOR AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY (IEEE METROAGRIFOR 2021)

Authors: Li, Tailin; Jerabek, Jakub; Zumr, David; Noreika, Nina; Dostal, Tomas

Abstract

A good understanding of soil moisture spatial patterns is useful for assessing the hydrological connectivity and runoff generation processes in a catchment. Thus, we have applied numerical modelling approaches to investigate the spatial patterns of soil moisture at the Nučice experimental catchment (0.531 km 2 ) in the Czech Republic. The catchment was established in 2011 to observe the rainfall-runoff processes, soil erosion and water balance in an agricultural landscape. The catchment consists of three fields covering over 95 % of the area. Eight field surveys were conducted to capture the soil moisture patterns at different scales. Even though the soil management and soil properties in the fields of Nučice seem to be nearly homogeneous, we have observed spatial variability in topsoil moisture. In numerical simulations, a 3D spatially-distributed model MIKE-SHE was used to simulate the water movement within the catchments. The MIKE-SHE simulation has been mainly calibrated with rainfall-runoff observations and point-scale soil moisture data. In the simulation, we have obtained the spatial patterns of soil moisture at each time step. The soil moisture spatial patterns from the simulation have been compared with the density of the vegetation cover (NDVI), and topsoil moisture patterns from field surveys. We found that the density of vegetation cover has a good correlation with the soil moisture spatial distribution. However, this correlation was not captured in the MIKE-SHE simulation. Future research will include Cosmic-ray neutron sensing and stable isotope analysis to improve the current understanding of the catchment.

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In Water

Authors: Istanbuly, Mustafa Nur; Dostal, Tomas; Jabbarian Amiri, Bahman

Abstract

In this study, the soil erosion regulation ecosystem services of the CORINE land use/ land cover types along with soil intrinsic features and geomorphological factors were examined by using the soil erosion data of 327 catchments in Poland, with a mean area of 510 ± 330 km2, applying a multivariate regression modeling approach. The results showed that soil erosion is accelerated by the discontinuous urban fabric (r = 0.224, p ≤ 0.01), by construction sites (r = 0.141, p ≤ 0.05), non-irrigated arable land (r = 0.237, p ≤ 0.01), and is mitigated by coniferous forest (r = −0.322, p ≤ 0.01), the clay ratio (r = −0.652, p ≤ 0.01), and the organic content of the soil (r = −0.622, p ≤ 0.01). The models also indicated that there is a strong relationship between soil erosion and the percentage of land use/land cover types (r2 = [0.62, 0.82, 0.83, 0.74]), i.e., mixed forest, non-irrigated arable land, fruit trees and berry plantations, broad-leaf forest, sport and leisure facilities, construction sites, and mineral extraction sites. The findings show that the soil erosion regulation ecosystem service is sensitive to broadleaf forests, rainfed agriculture, soil water content, terrain slope, drainage network density, annual precipitation, the clay ratio, the soil carbon content, and the degree of sensitivity increases from the broadleaf forest to the soil carbon content.

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In Agronomy

Authors: Arias-Giraldo, Luis F.; Guzman, Gema; Montes-Borrego, Miguel; Gramaje, David; Gomez, Jose A.; Landa, Blanca B.

Abstract

Among the agricultural practices promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy to increase soil functions, the use of cover crops is a recommended tool to improve the sustainability of Mediterranean woody crops such as olive orchards. However, there is a broad range of cover crop typologies in relation to its implementation, control and species composition. In that sense, the influence of different plant species on soil quality indicators in olive orchards remains unknown yet. This study describes the effects of four treatments based on the implementation of different ground covers (CC-GRA: sown cover crop with gramineous, CC-MIX: sown cover crop with a mixture of species and CC-NAT: cover crop with spontaneous vegetation) and conventional tillage (TILL) on soil erosion, soil physicochemical and biological properties after 8 years of cover crop establishment. Our results demonstrated that the presence of a temporary cover crop (CC), compared to a soil under tillage (TILL), can reduce soil losses and maintain good soil physicochemical properties and modify greatly the structure and diversity of soil bacterial communities and its functioning. The presence of a homogeneous CC of gramineous (Lolium rigidum or Lolilum multiflorum) (CC-GR) for 8 years increased the functional properties of the soil as compared to TILL; although the most relevant change was a modification on the bacterial community composition that was clearly different from the rest of treatments. On the other hand, the use of a mixture of plant species (CC-MIX) as a CC for only two years although did not modify greatly the structure and diversity of soil bacterial communities compared to the TILL soil, induced significant changes on the functional properties of the soil and reverted those properties to a level similar to that of an undisturbed soil that had maintained a natural cover of spontaneous vegetation for decades (CC-NAT).

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In Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

Authors: Shengping Wang, Borbala Szeles, Carmen Krammer, Elmar Schmaltz, Kepeng Song, Yifan Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Günter Blöschl, and Peter Strauss

Abstract

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In Sustainability

Authors: Winterová J, Krása J, Bauer M, Noreika N, Dostál T

Abstract

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