About this Research Topic

Background

For centuries, irrigated lands have been key to the global food supply. To confront the challenge of feeding the ever-increasing world population and the limited availability of water exacerbated by climate change, irrigation water use efficiency (WUE) must be increased.

In this regard, three main advances have been achieved since the mid-1900s: The first was the change from full soil cover irrigation (flood, furrow) to pressurized and localized systems through hydraulic control valves. Drip irrigation was first developed in Israel and USA in the 1950s. In this context, a step forward was the introduction of the concept of crop evapotranspiration (ETc) in crop irrigation schemes. However, the method provides a certain degree of uncertainty when calculating water needs to satisfy the diversity of parameters that affect crop coefficients (Kc).

The second progress was related to Deficit Irrigation (DI) strategies, designed mainly in arid and semiarid countries from the 1980s, and aimed at reducing irrigation during those phenological stages less sensible to water deficits (non-critical periods), avoiding yield impacts. Furthermore, the use of low-quality irrigation, such as desalinated seawater and reclaimed wastewater, are promising irrigation alternatives, which can be combined with DI strategies.

The third advance was bringing drip irrigation into line with the Precision Sustainable Irrigation (PSI) concept. This is defined as a real-time decision-making process that may consider a wide number of variables such as soil texture variability, plant root depth, soil water storage, plant phenological stage, atmospheric water demand, and rainfall forecast, among others.

The PSI concept is focused on increasing food production, crop productivity, water use efficiency, and CO2 absorption, while at the same time lowering energy and labor costs and reducing environmental footprint. The development of new sensors and devices for continuous and automatic recording of main variables associated with water stress, together with the production of inexpensive but powerful and reliable devices for data recording and transmission, as well as advances in remote imagery, have made possible the development of PSI.

Additionally, new technologies for precise irrigation are based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In recent years, many sensors have been developed for agriculture, but research on ICT data analytics in agriculture is still quite limited. Since the implementation of accurate PSI demands intensive field-data acquisition sensors, a major effort of knowledge transfer is required by considering the specific environmental conditions and crop cultivation in order to convey the scientific know-how into a practical solution for the end-users who are going to practice PSI techniques.

This Research Topic is oriented toward early or mid-career researchers to give them visibility within the scientific community and advance their research careers. They may lead the publications derived from their research, either as a first or corresponding author, regardless of whether they are in the early stages of their research careers (undergraduate, graduate, Master, and Ph.D. students) or intermediate stage (postdoctoral researchers or junior group leaders). Along with the publication, it is recommended that you add a description personal profile and scientific background.

We welcome submissions of different types of manuscripts including original research papers, reviews, and methods, on themes that include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Irrigation strategies to optimize water use efficiency
• Monitoring techniques by soil–plant-atmosphere-based sensors for sustainable irrigation management
• Use of non-conventional water resources for irrigation: wastewater, saline, and desalinated water
• Innovate approaches for assessing abiotic stresses (spectral and thermal information)
• Physiological and agronomical crop performance under PSI techniques

Keywords: #CollectionSeries, deficit irrigation, ecophysiology, plant–soil-atmosphere monitoring, precise irrigation scheduling, saline and water stress, spectral and thermal data, water use efficiency

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