Environmental Benefits and Concerns of Center-Pivot Irrigation

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.251 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Leonor Rodriguez Sinobas

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

The United States ◽

Climatic Conditions ◽

Environmental Benefits ◽

Surface Irrigation ◽

Irrigation Systems ◽

Center Pivot ◽

Key Issues ◽

Precision Irrigation ◽

Control Water

Center-pivot irrigation systems started in the United States in the mid-20th century as an irrigation method which surpassed the traditional surface irrigation methods. At that time, they had the potential to bring about higher irrigation efficiencies with less water consumption although their requirements in energy were higher too. Among their benefits, it is highlighted the feasibility to control water management as well as the application of agro-chemicals dissolved in the irrigation water and thus, center-pivot irrigation systems have spread worldwide. Nevertheless, since the last decade of the 20th century, they are facing actual concerns regarding ecosystem sustainability and water and energy efficiencies. Likewise, the 21st century has brought about the cutting edge issue “precision irrigation” which has made feasible the application of water, fertilizers, and chemicals as the plant demands taking into account variables such as: sprinkler´s pressure, terrain topography, soil variability, and climatic conditions. Likewise, it could be adopted to deal with the current key issues regarding the sustainability and efficiency of the center-pivot irrigation to maintain the agro-ecosystems but still, other issues such as the organic matter incorporation are far to be understood and they will need further studies.

Download Full-text

Automatic Identification of Center Pivot Irrigation Systems from Landsat Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Agriculture ◽

10.3390/agriculture8100147 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 8 (10) ◽

pp. 147 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Chenxiao Zhang ◽

Peng Yue ◽

Liping Di ◽

Zhaoyan Wu

Keyword(s):

Neural Networks ◽

Convolutional Neural Networks ◽

Water Resource Management ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

The United States ◽

Training Data ◽

Machine Learning Techniques ◽

Automatic Identification ◽

Irrigation Systems ◽

Center Pivot

Being hailed as the greatest mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animals by the tractor, center pivot irrigation systems irrigate crops with a significant reduction in both labor and water needs compared to traditional irrigation methods, such as flood irrigation. In the last few decades, the deployment of center pivot irrigation systems has increased dramatically throughout the United States. Monitoring the installment and operation of the center pivot systems can help: (i) Water resource management agencies to objectively assess water consumption and properly allocate water resources, (ii) Agro-businesses to locate potential customers, and (iii) Researchers to investigate land use change. However, few studies have been carried out on the automatic identification and location of center pivot irrigation systems from satellite images. Growing rapidly in recent years, machine learning techniques have been widely applied on image recognition, and they provide a possible solution for identification of center pivot systems. In this study, a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) approach was proposed for identification of center pivot irrigation systems. CNNs with different structures were constructed and compared for the task. A sampling approach was presented for training data augmentation. The CNN with the best performance and less training time was used in the testing area. A variance-based approach was proposed to further locate the center of each center pivot system. The experiment was applied to a 30-m resolution Landsat image, covering an area of 20,000 km2 in North Colorado. A precision of 95.85% and a recall of 93.33% of the identification results indicated that the proposed approach performed well in the center pivot irrigation systems identification task.

Download Full-text

A Geographical Survey of Center Pivot Irrigation Systems in the Central and Southern High Plains Aquifer Region of the United States

Applied Engineering in Agriculture ◽

10.13031/aea.14693 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 37 (6) ◽

pp. 1139-1145

Author(s):

Kianoosh Hassani ◽

Saleh Taghvaeian ◽

Hamed Gholizadeh

Keyword(s):

Water Level ◽

Precision Agriculture ◽

The United States ◽

Water Levels ◽

High Plains ◽

List Type ◽

High Plains Aquifer ◽

Irrigation Systems ◽

Southern High Plains ◽

Center Pivot

HighlightsAll center pivot irrigation systems in the Central and Southern High Plains Aquifer region were digitized.Out of 2.76 Mha under center pivots, the largest portion (58%) was in Texas and the smallest (2%) in Colorado.Most center pivots were about 50 ha, with a range of 1 to >230 ha.The new layer can be used in extracting distributed soil, weather, and crop data for various precision agriculture applications.Abstract. With the declines in water levels of the Central and Southern High Plains Aquifer, there is a critical need to accurately map the irrigated agriculture in this region as it is the largest user of groundwater resources. The goal of this study was to develop a geospatial database of all areas under the most dominant irrigation system in the region: center pivots. The borders of all center pivots (50,116) were manually digitized using high spatial resolution satellite imagery, delineating the area that can be potentially irrigated by these systems. Most center pivots were comparable in size (ca. 50 ha), with a range of 1 to >230 ha. The areas of digitized center pivots at the state and study area levels were relatively close to estimates of two actual irrigated area products based on automatic land classification. The new layer was also used to extract available data on groundwater level changes since predevelopment (before 1950). Aquifer regions under center pivots in Colorado and Texas had the smallest and largest declines in water level, respectively. The new layer offers advantages in terms of accurately identifying the area covered by center pivots and has potential research and practical applications such as studying adopted practices in response to water level declines, assessing field-scale irrigation uniformity, and extracting distributed soil, weather, and crop data to be used in various precision agriculture applications. The new layer is freely available to the public as supplemental information of this article (https://doi.org/10.13031/14707284). Keywords: Groundwater decline, Irrigated fields, Ogallala, Sprinkler irrigation.

Download Full-text

Private letters of Siberian exiles about the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: 1908–1912

Herald of an Archivist ◽

10.28995/2073-0101-2018-2-508-521 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 508-521

Author(s):

Dmitrii A. Baksht ◽

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Police Department ◽

General System ◽

Climatic Conditions ◽

Russian Revolution ◽

Early 20Th Century ◽

Historical Sources ◽

Revolutionary Movement ◽

State Management ◽

Management Institutions

The article studies the Turukhansk region as a territory with distinct climatic conditions and, consequently, with distinctive state management institutions and does so in the context of modernization processes of late 19th – early 20th century. This part of the Yenisei gubernia having become a region of mass exile after the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, its integration into a general system of management slowed down. Private letters of exiles are an important historical source, they reveal many aspects of the daily life of the persons under supervising in the inter-revolutionary period. The ‘Turukhansk revolt’ in the winter of 1908/09 revealed not only the ineffectiveness of exile as a penal measure, but also severel major problems of the region: archaic and scanty management institutions, lack of transport communication with southern uezds of the gubernia, underpopulation, and also gubernia and metropolitan officials’ ignorance of local affairs. The agencies of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs expanded the practice of perlustration as involvement in the revolutionary movement grew. Siberian exiles had their correspondence routinely inspected, and yet in most cases they were inexperienced enough not to encrypt their messages. Surviving perlustration materials offer an ambivalent picture of the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: there were both approval and condemnation of the participants’ actions. The documents tell a tale of extreme cruelty of the punitive detachments even towards those who were not involved in the resistance. The subject of the Siberian exile of the early 20th century has research potential. There is virtually no scholarship on the exiles’ self-reflection concerning the ‘common violence’ of both anti-governmental groups and state punitive agencies. Diversification in political/party or social/class affiliation is not enough. The new materials have revealed a significant gap between several ‘streams’ of exiles: those banished to Siberia in midst of the First Russian Revolution differed from those exiled in 1910s. The article concludes that, having departed from the previous approach to studying the exile, ego-sources cease to be of lesser importance than other types of historical sources. Their subjectivity becomes an advantage for a high-quality text analysis.

Download Full-text

Populism and Liberal Democracy

10.1093/oso/9780198837886.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Takis S. Pappas

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Liberal Democracy ◽

The United States ◽

Comprehensive Theory ◽

The People ◽

Original Definition ◽

Key Issues ◽

Great Relevance ◽

Definition Of

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.

Download Full-text

Patient Autonomy, Capacity, and Consent

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190846756.013.51 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Mary Donnelly ◽

Jessica Berg

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

National Level ◽

The United States ◽

Legal Framework ◽

National Standard ◽

Legal Principles ◽

Key Issues ◽

Human Rights Norms ◽

Law And Legislation

This chapter explores a number of key issues: the role of competence and capacity, advance directives, and decisions made for others. It analyses the ways these are treated in the United States and in selected European jurisdictions. National-level capacity legislation and human rights norms play a central role in Europe, which means that healthcare decisions in situations of impaired capacity operate in accordance with a national standard. In the United States, the legal framework is more state-based (rather than federal), and the courts have played a significant role, with both common law and legislation varying considerably across jurisdictions. Despite these differences, this chapter identifies some similar legal principles which have developed.

Download Full-text

China – Tariff Rate Quotas for Certain Agricultural Products: Against the Grain: Can the WTO Open Chinese Markets? A Contaminated Experiment

World Trade Review ◽

10.1017/s1474745621000148 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Joseph Glauber ◽

Simon Lester

Keyword(s):

Bilateral Trade ◽

The United States ◽

Legal Aspects ◽

Tariff Rate ◽

Economic Interests ◽

Trade Relations ◽

Tariff Rate Quotas ◽

International Obligations ◽

Trade Relationship ◽

Key Issues

Abstract The US complaint about Chinese tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) on certain grain products helps illustrate several key issues in US–China trade relations and the effectiveness of WTO disputes. First, do international obligations based on transparency and fairness work in relation to an authoritarian country not known for the rule of law domestically? Second, can there be a disconnect between the legal aspects of a dispute and the underlying economic interests, with a DSB ruling sometimes not leading to improved trade flows? And third, given the bilateral trade war and ‘phase one’ trade deal between the United States and China, has the WTO been superseded in this trade relationship? This paper summarizes the facts and law of the China–TRQs dispute, and examines each of these questions in that context.

Download Full-text

Automation Module for Precision Irrigation Systems

2020 IEEE 26th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME) ◽

10.1109/siitme50350.2020.9292300 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Ioan Lita ◽

Daniel Alexandru Visan ◽

Alin Gheorghita Mazare ◽

Laurentiu Mihai Ionescu ◽

Adrian Ioan Lita

Keyword(s):

Irrigation Systems ◽

Precision Irrigation

Download Full-text

Variation in Ectosymbiont Assemblages Associated with Rock Pigeons (Columba livia) from Coast to Coast in Canada

Diversity ◽

10.3390/d13010009 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 9

Author(s):

Alexandra Grossi ◽

Heather Proctor

Keyword(s):

Columba Livia ◽

The United States ◽

Climatic Conditions ◽

Assemblage Structure ◽

Meteorological Variables ◽

Urban Center ◽

Sampling Locations ◽

Maximum Temperatures ◽

Symbiont Species ◽

Maximum Humidity

When a species colonizes a new area, it has the potential to bring with it an array of smaller-bodied symbionts. Rock Pigeons (Columba livia Gmelin) have colonized most of Canada and are found in almost every urban center. In its native range, C. livia hosts more than a dozen species of ectosymbiotic arthropods, and some of these lice and mites have been reported from Rock Pigeons in the United States. Despite being so abundant and widely distributed, there are only scattered host-symbiont records for rock pigeons in Canada. Here we sample Rock Pigeons from seven locations across Canada from the west to east (a distance of > 4000 km) to increase our knowledge of the distribution of their ectosymbionts. Additionally, because ectosymbiont abundance can be affected by temperature and humidity, we looked at meteorological variables for each location to assess whether they were correlated with ectosymbiont assemblage structure. We found eight species of mites associated with different parts of the host’s integument: the feather dwelling mites Falculifer rostratus (Buchholz), Pterophagus columbae (Sugimoto) and Diplaegidia columbae (Buchholz); the skin mites: Harpyrhynchoides gallowayi Bochkov, OConnor and Klompen, H. columbae (Fain), and Ornithocheyletia hallae Smiley; and the nasal mites Tinaminyssus melloi (Castro) and T. columbae (Crossley). We also found five species of lice: Columbicola columbae (Linnaeus), Campanulotes compar (Burmeister), Coloceras tovornikae Tendeiro, Hohorstiella lata Piaget, and Bonomiella columbae Emerson. All 13 ectosymbiont species were found in the two coastal locations of Vancouver (British Columbia) and Halifax (Nova Scotia). The symbiont species found in all sampling locations were the mites O. hallae, H. gallowayi, T. melloi and T. columbae, and the lice Colu. columbae and Camp. compar. Three local meteorological variables were significantly correlated with mite assemblage structure: annual minimum and maximum temperatures and maximum humidity in the month the pigeon was collected. Two local meteorological variables, annual maximum and average temperatures, were significantly correlated with louse assemblages. Our results suggest that milder climatic conditions may affect richness and assemblage structure of ectosymbiont assemblages associated with Rock Pigeons in Canada.

Download Full-text