Water and Agriculture

Drought effects on US maize and soybean production: spatiotemporal patterns and historical changes

Maximizing agricultural production on existing cropland is one pillar of meeting future global food security needs. To close crop yield gaps, it is critical to understand how climate extremes such as drought impact yield. Here, we use gridded, daily …

Untangling the effects of shallow groundwater and soil texture as drivers of subfield-scale yield variability

Water table depth (WTD), soil texture, and growing season weather conditions all play critical roles in determining agricultural yield; however, the interactions among these three variables have never been explored in a systematic way. Using a …

Using evapotranspiration to assess drought sensitivity on a subfield scale with HRMET, a high resolution surface energy balance model

Evapotranspiration (ET) rates provide a valuable within-season indicator of plant productivity, as well as data on fluxes of water in a landscape. Applying remote sensing for ET estimation has potential to improve the sustainable management of water …