Pruning determines the plant water status due to its effects on the leaf area and thus the irrigation management. The primary aim of this study was to assess the use of high-resolution multispectral imagery to estimate the plant water status through different bands and vegetation indexes (VIs) and to evaluate which is most suitable under different pruning management strategies. This work was carried out in 2021 and 2022 in a commercial Merlot vineyard in an arid area of central Spain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe conversion of native forest into agricultural land, which is common in many parts of the world, poses important questions regarding soil degradation, demanding further efforts to better understand the effect of land use change on soil functions. With the advent of 3D computed tomography techniques and computing power, new methods are becoming available to address this question. In this direction, in the current work we implement a modification of the Fisher-Shannon method, borrowed from information theory, to quantify the complexity of twelve 3D CT soil samples from a sugarcane plantation and twelve samples from a nearby native Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLand use and land cover (LULC) scenarios in rural catchment hydrology are crucial to describe the effects of future water dynamics. However, there is a lack of understanding of the effectiveness of including static land covers at the subbasin level to provide inter-annual stability in changing the different water balance components. We developed a step-by-step mapping protocol to extend and enrich the hydrological assessment of future LULC scenarios defined through participatory stakeholder involvement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEstimates suggest that more than 70% of the world's rangelands are degraded. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is commonly used by ecologists and agriculturalists to monitor vegetation and contribute to more sustainable rangeland management. This paper aims to explore the scaling character of NDVI and NDVI anomaly (NDVIa) time series by applying three fractal analyses: generalized structure function (GSF), multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA), and Hurst index (HI).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScientificWorldJournal
April 2015
New European directives have proposed the direct application of compost and digestate produced from municipal solid wastes as organic matter sources in agricultural soils. Therefore information about phosphorus leaching from these residues when they are applied to the soil is increasingly important. Leaching experiments were conducted to determine the P mobility in compost and digestate mixtures, supplying equivalent amounts to 100 kg P ha(-1) to three different types of soils.
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