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Beneficial water use fraction Cut-off time Distribution uniformity Impacts of land levelling Infiltration Water-saving irrigation needs to be implemented in Hetao irrigation district to help satisfying the demand by other users in the Yellow River basin. Aiming at assessing the potential irrigation performance and water saving at farm level, a set of traditional basins and another of precision-levelled basins cropped with maize, wheat and sunflower and managed by farmers were evaluated. Data were collected to characterise the basin sizes, microtopography, inflow rates, advance and recession times, cut-off time and soil water content. In addition, families of infiltration curves were derived from field observations and subsequent use of model SIRMOD. Infiltration was higher for the precision-levelled basins and decreased from the first to the next irrigation events. Infiltration data were used to support the computation of distribution uniformity (DU), beneficial water use fraction (BWUF) and deep percolation (DP). For traditional basins, DU and BWUF were low and DP was high. When precise land levelling was practised, DU increased greatly to near 94% but BWUF improved little, because irrigation scheduling was inadequate leading to excessive water application; however, non-negligible water saving was achieved for maize and wheat since they have higher irrigation demand. In contrast, simulating the application of an appropriate irrigation scheduling through adjusting the cut-off time led to an approximately unchanged DU but BWUF greatly increased and DP reduced to 10% on average. This condition represents a potential water saving of 34e39%; however its achievement requires improved design of farm systems, appropriate irrigation water deliveries and scheduling, and the support and training of farmers.

The water-retaining and yield-increasing capacity of super-absorbent polymer (SAP) are essential for soil remediation in arid and semi-arid areas. Therefore, it is of great significance to investigate the influencing factors and mechanisms of SAP effects on soil environments and crop growth for the precise management of agricultural water-saving irrigation. In this study, we adopted SAP as a soil conditioner and monitored changes in soil temperature, photosynthetic rate, leaf transpiration rate, chlorophyll, crop growth indexes (plant height, stem diameter, leaf area index, dry matter accumulation), and yield under different SAP doses during the growth stage of maize, on the basis of which the improvement mechanism of SAP in arid and semi-arid soil was analyzed. The results demonstrated the following: (1) 45 kg/hm2 of SAP application could increase the temperature of the soil layer, effectively reduce the diurnal temperature variation of the soil surface, and promote the stable growth of maize; (2) when different SAP doses were applied, the leaf surface temperature of maize increased by 0.95 °C on average. In particular, when 135 kg/hm2 of SAP was applied, the leaf surface temperature increased by 1.55 °C; (3) SAP could promote the photosynthetic rate of maize. In addition, the plant height, leaf area index, and dry matter accumulation of maize gradually increased with an increasing amount of SAP; (4) the application of SAP not only increased the grain row number, ear row number, and average 100-seed weight, but also increased the crop yield by nearly 6%. The application of SAP demonstrated a comprehensive utility (redistribution of soil water and temperature, synergy between SAPs and plants), which suggests that the most basic goal, to ensure socio-economic and ecological sustainability in dryland systems, was obtained.

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