Agronomy

Selecting suitable agricultural land is critical for food security and sustainable development, particularly in arid regions facing resource scarcity and environmental degradation. This study assesses agricultural land suitability in Sohag governorate, Egypt, using a hybrid Geographic Information System (GIS), Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and geostatistical approach. Thirty-four repr…

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are often considered host generalists. Although the host-mediated assembly of AM fungal communities is well documented, its functional significance remains poorly understood, particularly in organic and low-input agroecosystems, where crop–weed interactions may influence the soil AM fungal reservoir. We investigated plant and AM fungal functional traits, mycorrhi…

The Penman–Monteith model is the standard method for computing reference evapotranspiration (ETo–PM), requiring full meteorological data including solar radiation (Rs), actual vapor pressure (ea), and wind speed (u2). However, not all of these data are always available. This study incorporated temperature-based methods recently developed for estimating Rs (Rs_dev) and ea (ea_dev) into the ETo–PM …

Mulched drip irrigation is an important water-saving production system for soybean cultivation in arid and semi-arid regions. However, soybean materials harvested from this system exhibit specific physical characteristics, including relatively dry pods and seeds and high stem moisture content. This study characterized the physical and mechanical properties of soybean seeds at the harvest stage an…

Monetary ecosystem service (ES) valuations often differ across studies even when similar methods are applied because available data implicitly determine which biophysical, management, and demand-side drivers are represented. These implicit “valuation boundaries” are rarely reported, limiting comparability, evidence synthesis, and benefit transfer. We propose a logic-chain-based reporting framewor…

Purpose: The temporal effectiveness of double-cropping rice systems in southern China is limited by the slow natural decomposition rate of straw, which represents a crucial ecological bottleneck. This study reports on two consecutive pot experiments—one conducted in the 2019 late-rice season (cultivar: Tianyou Huazhan) and the other in the 2020 early-rice season (cultivar: Taiyou 98)—to investiga…

Global path planning for autonomous orchard robots must balance obstacle clearance, path smoothness, and trajectory trackability. This balance is difficult to achieve in unstructured orchards, where irregular tree rows, scattered trunks and ground obstacles, and narrow inter-row passages can cause conventional planners to generate low-clearance paths with frequent local turns. This study proposes…

Accurate weed detection is essential for site-specific weed management because uncontrolled weeds compete with crops for water, nutrients, light, and growing space, while uniform herbicide application increases production costs and environmental pressure. Existing UAV-based weed detection methods remain limited by three core gaps: inadequate representation of heterogeneous and imbalanced UAV-deri…

Quinoa leaf spot is an important fungal disease that limits quinoa yield and quality. This study aimed to evaluate the pathogenicity of isolates associated with quinoa leaf spot in Qinghai, China, and to screen multifunctional biocontrol bacteria with potential for further development. Pathogenicity assays conducted on healthy quinoa leaves showed that isolates Alternaria alternata AF15 and A. te…

Straw-derived biochar is increasingly used for residue recycling and soil fertility improvement, but its effects on soil inorganic phosphorus (P) fractions and their relationships with available P (AP) remain unclear. Here, we synthesized 1170 paired observations from 51 studies using meta-analysis, partial least squares path modeling, and machine learning to quantify straw biochar effects on soi…

Elevated CO2 (eCO2) is expected to enhance crop productivity but may simultaneously reduce nutritional quality through nutrient dilution. However, responses among crop species with contrasting functional traits and the associated plant–soil responses remain insufficiently understood. Using a multi-crop Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) platform, we investigated the effects of eCO2 on per-plant bioma…

Electrostatic spraying improves droplet deposition on the undersides of leaves and within canopy-obscured regions. However, existing studies mainly rely on two-dimensional trajectory analyses or simplified computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, limiting the mechanistic understanding of the three-dimensional transport behaviour of charged droplets. To address this limitation, an integrated ana…

To address the limited synergy between integrated water–fertilizer technologies and intelligent application equipment, as well as the low water–nitrogen use efficiency in rapeseed production systems in southwestern China—which together constrain the large-scale adoption of smart fertigation equipment—this study conducted a two-season field experiment using an integrated water–fertilizer applicati…

Extensive livestock farming is characteristic of the landscape of the Mediterranean regions of Southern Iberian Peninsula. These production systems based on dryland pastures provide a wide range of services and contribute to maintaining environmental balance when compared with intensive agricultural or other livestock production systems. The Portuguese Montado is a habitat of Community importance…

In semi-humid loess regions, young apple–soybean alley-cropping is constrained by water competition and phenolic accumulation, but how emitter-line layout reorganizes soil biochemical environment remains unclear. This study evaluated whether locally used management systems differed in the spatial coupling of phenolic load, biological activity, and productivity. A two-year field experiment compare…

Accurately assessing crop nitrogen deficiency could improve nitrogen use efficiency and minimize the environmental issues caused by excessive nitrogen fertilizer application. The critical nitrogen dilution curve and nitrogen nutrition index (NNI) are widely used to de-scribe the nitrogen status of crops during growth. Hyperspectral estimation research has mostly focused on the vegetative growth s…

Micro-sprinkler irrigation is commonly used to optimize plant growing environments and prevent growth inhibition and yield losses caused by high air temperatures (Ta) in greenhouses. Nevertheless, instantaneous photosynthetic rate measurements suffer from time lag, and the temporally dynamic microclimate alterations induced by micro-sprinkling make it difficult to reproduce the real ambient condi…

Wastewater sludge can improve soil fertility and support resource recycling, but potential heavy metal accumulation limits its agricultural application. In this study, we evaluated the effects of anaerobically digested wastewater sludge, applied alone or in combination with the purple non-sulfur bacterium (Rhodopseudomonas palustris), on two green manure crops, Sesbania cannabina and Glycine max.…

Global warming-induced temperature increases adversely affect plant growth, exacerbating agricultural risks and threatening global food security. These challenges are particularly acute for important crops like non-heading Chinese cabbage (NHCC; Brassica campestris L. syn. B. rapa), a nutritionally and economically significant leafy vegetable cultivated worldwide. While breeding for thermotoleran…

Chrysanthemum morifolium is an important ornamental crop whose flowering is strictly regulated by photoperiod. However, the molecular mechanisms linking photoperiod signals to floral meristem identity and organ development in Asteraceae remain unclear. In this study, we identified and characterized CmAFL1, a FUL-like MADS-box gene specific to the Asteraceae family, in the short-day cultivar ‘Jinb…