Advancing Water Management and Conservation in Irrigated Arid Lands

The long-term objectives of this project are to develop decision support tools and sensing and computing technologies to support improved crop water use efficiency for irrigated agriculture in arid lands. Objective 1: Develop and integrate models, tools, and strategies to optimize water and nutrient use efficiencies under sufficient, reduced, and variable-rate irrigation strategies in arid environments. Subobjective 1A: Quantify cotton physiological development, fiber yield, fiber quality, and water use responses to variable irrigation rate and timing. Subobjective 1B: Develop end-user irrigation scheduling models for cotton and other crops. Subobjective 1C: Develop nitrogen fertilizer scheduling strategies and tools for cotton. Objective 2: Use remote and proximal sensing at regional and field scales for crop and water management and use proximal sensing for high throughput phenotyping for heat and drought tolerant cultivars. Subobjective 2A: Develop and evaluate airborne and satellite-based remote sensing methods to estimate crop evapotranspiration, ETc, at irrigation district scale. Subobjective 2B: Develop and evaluate airborne and drone-based remote sensing methods to estimate crop evapotranspiration, ETc, at field scale. Subobjective 2C: Develop and evaluate ground-based proximal sensing methods that identify crop heat and drought stress at field scale. Objective 3: Develop and evaluate crop simulation models as tools to synthesize ?big? data from agricultural field studies and analyze alternative strategies for crop and water management. Subobjective 3A: Evaluate and improve Cotton2K and DSSAT-CSM models for simulation of cotton physiology, water use, and nutrient use in response to water and nutrient deficit. Subobjective 3B: Develop crop simulation modeling methodologies to analyze potential water savings and production impacts of variable-rate and deficit irrigation practices. Subobjective 3C: Develop methodologies to guide crop simulation and irrigation scheduling models using ?big data? from remote and proximal sensing and crop and soil mapping equipment. Objective 4: Develop concepts, technologies, and software tools for the hydraulic analysis of surface irrigation systems. Subobjective 4A: Develop software for the hydraulic analysis of irrigation systems. Subobjective 4B: Model irrigation-induced soil erosion. Subobjective 4C: Develop field technologies for improved surface irrigation management.