Water consumption and soil moisture distribution in melon crop with mulching and in a protected environment

Abstract

Mulching has become an important technique for land cover, but there are some technical procedures which should be adjusted for these new modified conditions to establish optimum total water depth. It is also important to observe the soil-water relations as soil water distribution and wetted volume dimensions. The objective of the present study was to estimate melon evapotranspiration under mulching in a protected environment and to verify the water spatial distribution around the melon root system in two soil classes. Mulching provided 27 mm water saving by reducing water evaporation. In terms of volume each plant received, on average, the amount of 175.2 L of water in 84 days of cultivation without mulching, while when was used mulching the water requirement was 160.2 L per plant. The use of mulching reduced the soil moisture variability throughout the crop cycle and allowed a greater distribution of soil water that was more intense in the clay soil. The clayey soil provided on average 43 mm more water depth retention in 0.50 m soil deep relative to the sandy loam soil, and reduced 5.6 mm the crop cycle soil moisture variation compared to sandy loam soil.

Water Use Dynamics in Double Cropping of Rainfed Upland Rice and Irrigated Melons Produced Under Drought‐Prone Tropical Conditions

“…Measured mean daily ET rates of the studied melon crop (2.4 mm/day) were in agreement with previous values reported for melons growing under dry‐climate irrigated experimental conditions with plastic mulched soils (2.1 mm/day; Teófilo et al, ), as well as for melons produced under experimental greenhouse conditions in Brazil (2.2 to 3.1 mm/day; Lozano et al, ; Monteiro et al, ). Reported values of common daily ET rates for irrigated paddy rice fields under tropical wet season conditions (4–5 mm/day; Steduto et al, ) also matched our measurements of upland rice maximum daily ET rates (~5.5 mm/day), which were measured following heavy rain events resulted in high soil moisture (near saturation) and water ponding on the clayey soil.…”

The effects of biodegradable and plastic film mulching on nitrogen uptake, distribution, and leaching in a drip-irrigated sandy field

“…Drip irrigation under plastic film mulching (PFM) has been proven to be an excellent irrigation strategy with many benefits and advantages compared to no film mulching, such as saving irrigation water (Vázquez et al, 2006), preserving soil water (Berger et al, 2013), improving soil temperature (Filipovic et al, 2016), promoting early germination and harvest (Novello and Palma, 2008), and significantly increasing crop yields (Monday et al, 2015;Ospanbayev et al, 2017;He et al, 2018). Additionally, it can be used under different climate conditions and in different soil regions (Monteiro et al, 2013;Sharma et al, 2017;Fawibe et al, 2019;Qin et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019a,b), especially in arid, semi-arid, and sandy regions with low precipitation, high evaporation, and a limited soil water and fertilizer retention (Zhou et al, 2017;Dlamini et al, 2017). Therefore, drip irrigation under PFM has been used worldwide, including Japan (Fawibe et al, 2019), Pakistan (Nasrullah et al, 2011), Spain (Jordi et al, 1995), and China (Guo et al, 2019).…”