Autonomous Irrigation Management in Decision Agriculture

In this chapter, the important application of autonomous irrigation management in the field decision agriculture is discussed. The different types of sensor-guided irrigation systems are presented that includes center pivot systems and drip irrigation systems. Their sensing and actuator components are with detailed focus on real-time decision-making and integration to the cloud. This chapter also presents irrigation control systems which takes, as an input, soil moisture and temperature from IOUT and weather data from Internet and communicate with center pivot based irrigation systems. Moreover, the system architecture is explored where development of the nodes including sensing and actuators is presented. Finally, the chapter concludes with comprehensive discussion of adaptive control systems, software, and visualization system design

Breeding Cold-Tolerant Crops

Low-temperature stress is considered as the major abiotic constraint limiting plant\u2019s growth and the potential land cultivation. Crop adaptation to limiting temperature is thus an important breeding objective because it determines yield stability in environment-friendly cultivation practices. Conventional breeding methods had limited success in improving the cold tolerance of important crop plants because of the complexity of stress tolerance traits, low genetic variance, and lack of efficient selection criteria. The knowledge of physiology, of genetics, and of the DNA technology has improved substantially nowadays, and these advancements will allow the breeder to predict the breeding value of best genotypes by using physiology, genetics, and molecular information. The perspective for selecting more effectively cold-tolerant crops will involve efficient genotyping, reliable phenotyping and envirotyping, and adequate statistical models