Soil-Water Management: An Essential Step towards Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Water, Agriculture and Aquaculture".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 December 2020) | Viewed by 14290
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Agriculture is key to attaining UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 of ending hunger and achieving food security. As it is the direct livelihood for 2.5 billion smallholder farmers, it also contributes to ending poverty (SDG 1). However, when adopting sustainable principles, agriculture offers an immense opportunity to also address SDG 15 on the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems and halting and reversing land degradation, SDG 13 on combatting climate change and its impacts, and SDG 6 on ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water, contributing to water security.
Though subject to debate and contest, sustainable intensification in agriculture aims at enhancing agricultural productivity while minimizing the ecological footprint and rendering ecosystem services. In shifting to sustainable intensification in agriculture, the smart management of water on and in soil should be an entry point activity that can enforce the benefits of new technologies, including high-yielding crops, resource-friendly mechanization, efficient irrigation, and site-specific nutrient and pest management.
Soil-water management refers to the management of soil with the purpose of optimizing rainwater partitioning to enhance the quantity and flow of soil water. It encompasses a wide spectrum of practices aiming at promoting the infiltration of rain in soil, slowing down and impeding runoff water, collecting rainwater where it falls, retaining water at levels available to crops, and minimizing soil evaporation and unproductive crop transpiration. In this Special Issue, we wish to collect a range of articles from all over the world demonstrating that smart soil-water management can realise higher biomass production, while averting environmental hazards and minimizing inputs, and thus should be an essential step towards sustainable intensification in agriculture. While making smart use of the natural functionalities that ecosystems offer at the watershed, landscape or regional scale is an important part of the sustainable intensification of agriculture, this Special Issue will focus on practices adopted at the field scale.
Prof. Dr. Wim Cornelis
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- soil-water management
- sustainable land management
- crop production
- conservation practices
- rainwater harvesting
- rainfed agriculture
- food security
- water security
- droughts and floods
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