Advances in SAR-Based Soil Moisture Retrieval Techniques, Applications, and Challenges

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing has emerged as a promising tool for soil moisture monitoring, due to its ability to penetrate clouds and measure the moisture content of the soil surface. In recent years, a wide range of SAR-based soil moisture retrieval techniques have been developed, from empirical regression models to physically-based models that incorporate surface roughness and vegetation effects. This review paper provides an overview of the latest advances in SAR-based soil moisture retrieval, covering the different techniques and algorithms that have been proposed, as well as the applications and challenges associated with the use of SAR data for soil moisture monitoring and management. The paper also discusses the limitations and uncertainties of SAR-based soil moisture retrieval, and provides recommendations for future research directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the state-of-the-art in SAR-based soil moisture retrieval, and to highlight the potential benefits and limitations of this approach for soil moisture monitoring and management

Source Code Indexer for SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3: Enhancing Code Comprehension through Hyperlinked Elements and Dependency Information

SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3 hydrological modeling software development demands good source code comprehension and navigation tools. This article introduces a thorough Source Code Indexer (SCI) to help comprehend SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3 source code. The SCI uses advanced software visualization techniques to build code element dependency graphs, inheritance diagrams, and cooperation diagrams, which are hyperlinked for easy navigation. The SCI retrieves class, method, variable, and function calls from SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3 source code. The SCI creates extremely informative and interactive dependency graphs to show how code pieces are connected. Readers can rapidly access code components and understand their dependencies using hyperlinked items in these graphs: SCI inheritance diagrams show the codebase's class hierarchy. These hyperlinked diagrams let readers easily study class relationships and functionalities. SCI collaboration diagrams depict runtime message passing and method invocations. These diagrams' hyperlinked sections make code execution easy to follow. SCI efficacy depends on knowing what to search for in the source code. Users may rapidly find and understand code components and dependencies using hyperlinked items. In conclusion, SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3 developers can visualize code with the Source Code Indexer. The SCI helps developers understand complex code architectures and find specific code pieces by linking dependency graphs, inheritance diagrams, and collaboration diagrams. This useful tool enhances hydrological modeling research and development and facilitates SWAT-MODFLOW Version 3 source code study

Multidimensional Food Security Nexus in Drylands under the Slow Onset Effects of Climate Change

Hyperarid, arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid areas cover approximately 41% of the global land area. The human population in drylands, currently estimated at 2.7 billion, faces limited access to sufficient, affordable, and nutritious food. We discuss the interlinkages among water security, environmental security, energy security, economic security, health security, and food security gov-ernance, and how they affect food security in drylands. Reliable and adequate water supply, and the prevention of water contamination, increase the potential for ample food, fodder, and fiber production. Protecting woodlands and rangelands increases food security by buffering the slow onset effects of climate change, including biodiversity loss, desertification, salinization, and land degradation. The protection of natural lands is expected to decrease environmental contamination, and simultaneously, reduce the transfer of diseases from wildlife to humans. Biofuel production and hydroelectric power plants increase energy security but generate land-use conflicts, deforestation, and ecosystem degradation. Economic security generally positively correlates with food security. However, economic growth often degrades the environment, changes tenure rights over natural resources, and stimulates migration to urban areas, resulting in lower food and health security

Water runoff harvesting systems for restoration of degraded rangelands: A review of challenges and opportunities

Mismanagement of rangelands worldwide has accelerated processes of overland flow and soil erosion, resulting in extensive land degradation. Wherever self-restoration processes of degraded rangelands are hindered or negated, active recovery efforts, coupled with livestock pressure management, might be needed. The objective of this review paper is to provide land managers and environmental planners with applied and practical knowledge on advantages and disadvantages of the main methodologies and practices for runoff harvesting in rangelands. Preferably, restoration efforts should focus on forming low-footprint runoff harvesting systems on hillslopes which encompass the runoff’s source area. These systems should imitate natural patchiness, strengthening source-sink relations, accelerating re-establishment of herbaceous and woody vegetation, maximizing the retaining of water on hillslopes, regulating hydrological connectivity, lessening soil erosion, and minimizing transmission of water to stream channels. The resulting lower-energy floods are expected to negate the need for massive check dams in channels. If flood dissipation in streams is still necessary, then high-to medium-porosity check dams, made of local materials, might be effective for lessening scour processes and sediment transport. Furthermore, in terms of environmental sustainability, a large number of pointed (e.g., branch bundles; brush or woody piles; micro-catchments) or low-to medium-footprint lineal means for regulating surface processes in hillslopes (e.g., stone terraces; contour furrows/trenches/ditches) and channels (e.g., log check dams; loose rock check dams; porous or semi-permeable rock check dams; gabions) are expected to be more cost-effective than a small number of massive means (e.g., contour bench terraces; earth bunds/dykes; concrete check dams)

The Promise and Perils of Google's Bard for Scientific Research

Bard is a large language model from Google AI, trained on a massive dataset of text and code. It can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. Bard has been shown to be effective in a variety of scientific applications, including data analysis, experiment design, literature review, and scientific writing. Bard is a powerful tool that can be used to accelerate scientific research

AI-Powered Gene-Based Crop Modelling: Advancements and Future Directions

Gene-based crop modelling is a rapidly evolving field that uses genetic data to improve crop breeding and management. The recent integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in gene-based crop modeling has enabled researchers to analyze large amounts of genetic data and identify patterns that are difficult for humans to detect. In this article review, we explore the current state of AI-powered gene-based crop modeling and its applications in crop breeding and management. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of this approach, as well as future directions for the field. Overall, the use of AI in gene-based crop modeling has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach crop breeding and management, leading to more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices

Advanced Computer Technologies for Integrated Agro-Hydrologic Systems Modeling: Coupled Crop and Hydrologic Models for Agricultural Intensification Impacts Assessment

Coupling hydrologic and crop models is increasingly becoming an important task when addressing agro-hydrologic systems studies. Either for resources conservation or cropping systems improvement, the complex interactions between hydrologic regime and crop management components requires an integrative approach in order to be fully understood. Nevertheless, the literature offers limited resources on models’ coupling that targets environmental scientists. Indeed, major of guides are are destined primarily for computer specialists and make them hard to encompass and apply. To address this gap, we present an extensive research to crop and hydrologic models coupling that targets earth agro-hydrologic modeling studies in its integrative complexity. The primary focus is to understand the relationship between agricultural intensification and its impacts on hydrologic balance. We provided documentations, classifications, applications and references of the available technologies and trends of development. We applied the results of the investigation by coupling the DREAM hydrologic model with DSSAT crop model. Both models were upgraded either on their code source (DREAM) or operational base (DSSAT) for interoperability and parallelization. The resulting model operates at a grid base and daily step. The model is applied southern Italy to analyze the effect of fertilizer application on runoff generation between 2000 and 2013. The results of the study show a significant impacts of nitrogen application on water yield. Indeed, nearly 71.5 thousand cubic-meter of rain water for every kilogram of nitrogen and per hectare is lost as a reduction of runoff coefficient. Furthermore, a significant correlation between the nitrogen applications amount and runoff is found at a yearly basis with Pearson’s coefficient of 0.93

Implementing parallel processing for DSSAT

There is a recognized need for implementing parallel computing within simulation models. Recently, there has been renewed interest in improving legacy models and their improvement in terms of hardware usage. Several studies have documented applications of environmental models using server, super- and high-performance computer frameworks. They showed that both the implementation process and the results of such simulation had potential to sharpen and to better understand biophysical processes. Nevertheless, parallelization has received limited attention in the development of the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) modeling system. For the past decades, DSSAT development has been largely focused on extending the list of crop models for various crops, development of additional tools and improvement of the existing ones for its operational tasks (e.g., calibration) and better compatibility with different operating systems (OS). We addressed this gap by proposing a non-invasive method to be implemented with DSSAT that allows simulations to be run in parallel on a Windows OS. The simulation benchmark presented here confirms that there is significant decrease in execution time when splitting runs to multithreaded workload

A review of coupled hydrologic and crop growth models

Coupling hydrologic and crop models is becoming an increasingly important approach in the development of agro-hydrologic theme. Scientists and decision makers working to address issues in the areas of resource conservation and agricultural productivity are interested in the complementary processing of the two coupled systems. The objective of the present work is to review relevant studies related to hydrologic and crop models coupling, and to analyze the domain applicability, limitations, and other considerations

Integrated crop-hydrologic Modelling: Methods, frameworks and communities of coupling

The core of agro-hydrologic research area is a multi-paradigms subject (i.e.: food security, climate variability, resources conservation, etc.). In order to make progress in understanding these dynamic structures, coupled models are becoming valuable instruments. They result from the sharing of data or processes within a determined system between individual models. However, there are no universal guidelines for coupling models, and the studies available in the literature are either study-case dependent or programmer-oriented guides. The objective of the present work is to providing an overview of the current coupling methodologies that are applicable for modeling of agro-hydrologic systems, as well as their communities of work