Tillage effects on soil physical condition and root growth associated with sugarcane water availability

Hydrostatic Equilibrium between Soil Samples and Pressure Plates Used in Soil Water Retention Determination: Consequences of a Questionable Assumption

“…For the purpose of this study, the concepts of TAW and RAW suffice as a straightforward example of how the lack of hydrostatic equilibrium of soil samples in the PPA may lead to erroneous estimation of these two largely used proxies of soil water availability (Kisekka et al, 2016;Minasny and McBratney, 2018;Kothari et al, 2019;Scarpare et al, 2019). Furthermore, for agro-hydrological simulations performed by process-based models, which are highly dependent on the soil hydraulic properties (K-θ-h), especially in the near-wilting range (De Jong van Lier et al, 2015), water retention curves of fine-textured soils fitted with PPA data may lead to faulty predictions of crop water demand due to poor simulations of crop drought stress, especially under dry conditions likely to occur in rainfed scenarios.…”

“…To obtain the data pairs θ (h), the most common measurement technique is based on establishing a hydrostatic equilibrium between an initially saturated soil sample and a porous medium device, such as a filter paper, fine sand, or a porous ceramic, at a certain tension (Dane and Hopmans, 2002;Cresswell et al, 2008). These measurements allow direct estimations of the static status of soil water availability, represented by the total soil available water, defined by specific pressure head values adopted as proxies of upper (field capacity) and lower (wilting point) limits of soil available water (Minasny and McBratney, 2018;Scarpare et al, 2019). On the other hand, the SWRC allows the dynamic simulation of soil water and nutrient balances by implementing Richards equation-based models such as Hydrus-1D (Šimůnek et al, 2016) or SWAP (Kroes et al, 2017).…”

A Deep Learning-Based Phenotypic Analysis of Rice Root Distribution from Field Images

“…The trench profile method is a technique to observe the vertical and horizontal root distribution of crops [ 10 ] by digging a vertical ditch beside the plant to quantify the distribution of roots present in the profile wall. The proportion of observable roots is the largest compared to the other field methods, and this technique is used for studying soil condition–root growth interactions [ 11 , 12 ] and for the basic characterization of crop root distribution [ 13 ]. The auger method is a sampling method primarily used to quantify vertical root distribution [ 10 ].…”

“…The trench profile method procedure consists of excavating the trench, flushing the trench profile wall, measuring the root length, and calculating the root distribution properties. Typically, the trench is dug perpendicularly using a backhoe [ 11 , 22 ]. The distance between the trench and plant influences the root distribution on the profile wall [ 12 , 23 ].…”

Sugarcane variety trait modelling: evaluating and improving the APSIM-Sugar model for simulating crop performance under current and future climates across Brazil

“…The authors argued that crop modellers should be cautious when informing future crop management adaptation strategies based on climate-crop model simulation studies, supporting the idea of the better adapted the agricultural systems nowadays, the less impact in future climates they will suffer. Exploring genetic improvements (for example, for drought resistance; and management adaptation (for example, deeper soil preparation; Scarpare et al, 2019) options for sugarcane are, therefore, of high priority across producing countries towards sustainable sugarcane production (Linnenluecke et al, 2018).…”