Vegetation Dynamics and Crop Stress: An Earth-Observation Perspective focuses on vegetation dynamics and crop stress at both the regional and country levels by using earth observation (EO) data sets. The book uniquely provides a better understanding of natural vegetation and crop failure through geo-spatial technologies. This book covers biophysical control of vegetation, deforestation, desertification, drought, and crop-water efficiency, as well as the application of satellite-derived measures from optical, thermal, and microwave domains for monitoring and modeling crop condition, agricultural drought, and crop health in contrasting monsoon/weather episodes. - Provides a quantitative analysis of vegetation and crop stress based on EO datasets - Offers descriptions of the spatially explicit vegetation and crop model development, implementation, and validation - Covers the impact of soil-water stress on crop performance and vegetation response to climate change using earth observation techniques

This book addresses the connections between the hydrologic cycle and plant ecosystems. It will appeal to advanced students and researchers from a large range of disciplines, including environmental science, hydrology, ecology, earth science, civil and environmental engineering, agriculture, and atmospheric science.

In the last 50 years, classical breeding has played a significant role in achieving higher crop productivity, but major crops have reached a plateau in their yield potential. Therefore, the current focus for sustainable intensification of agriculture is the use of biotechnological approaches to enhance the yield potential by combating the yield losses that occur due to abiotic stresses. The abiotic stresses are governed by multigenes, and therefore, a holistic approach is needed to get success in imparting stress tolerance to enhance the yield potential of our crops. Plants face multiple stress conditions during their life stages and adopt several physiological, biochemical, and molecular strategies to combat that, which are sometimes not sufficient to survive, particularly crop plants. The climate change era has created a need to understand the abiotic stresses in a holistic way. Therefore, a deep understanding of multiple abiotic stress mechanisms is necessary to develop crops tolerant to climate fluctuation. With this background, the outline of this book covers the following features: • Agriculture sustainability and molecular understanding of multiple stress tolerance • Systems biology for life-history strategies, conventional and genomic approaches above and underground • Genetic resources and molecular understanding of seed priming • Molecular signaling compounds, cell signal transduction, and crosstalk between plant growth hormones and regulators • Roles Transcription factors, LEA proteins, reactive oxygen species and alternative oxidase • Genome editing, metabolomics, and ‘omics’ technologies

Quantifying temporal changes in plant geometry as a result of genetic, developmental, or environmental causes is essential to improve our understanding of the structure and function relationships in plants. Over the last decades, optical imaging and remote sensing developed fundamental working tools to monitor and quantify our environment and plants in particular. Increased efficiency of methods lowered the barrier to compare, integrate, and interpret the optically obtained plant data across larger spatial scales and across scales of biological organization. In particular, acquisition speed at high resolutions reached levels that allow capturing the temporal dynamics in plants in three dimensions along with multi-spectral information beyond human visual senses. These advanced imaging capabilities have proven to be essential to detect and focus on analyzing temporal dynamics of plant geometries. The focus of this Research Topic is on optical techniques developed to study geometrical changes at the plant level detected within the wavelength spectrum between near-UV to near infrared. Such techniques typically involve photogrammetric, LiDAR, or imaging spectroscopy approaches but are not exclusively restricted to these. Instruments operating within this range of wavelengths allow capturing a wide range of temporal scales ranging from sub-second to seasonal changes that result from plant development, environmental effects like wind and heat, or genetically controlled adaption to environmental conditions. The Research Topic covered a plethora of methodological approaches as suggestions for best practices in the light of a particular research question and to a wider view to different research disciplines and how they utilize their state-of-the-art techniques in demonstrating potential use cases across different scales.

Based on palaeoecological studies by many authors, this book gives an overview of the changing history of the European plant cover during the past 2.6 million years, characterized by numerous cold and warm periods. The period of the last 20 000 years (from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present) is presented in detail, with special emphasis on the vegetation dynamics of Europe, the history of selected woody plants, the development of lakes and bogs and the emergence of European cultural landscapes under the influence of humans over thousands of years. In the analysis of the glacial and interglacial periods, the focus is on the different vegetation developments and the progressive impoverishment of the European flora. Further important topics are the spatio-temporal patterns and causes of long-term vegetation changes, the legacies of disturbances and land use on vegetation composition, the role of palaeoecology in nature conservation and its contribution to ecology and environmental sciences. In addition to recent research results, the book provides an overview of the main palaeoecological research methods. It concludes with a summary of the history of palaeoecology and Quaternary botany. For the first time, a detailed synthesis is presented of the many findings on European vegetation dynamics, which are complex and increasingly difficult to summarize. Numerous figures and tables, many of them original, accompany the text. The bibliography includes over 3000 publications. This book is primarily intended for students, researchers and practitioners in plant ecology, palaeoecology, palaeoclimatology, forestry, agronomy, Quaternary sciences, climate sciences, biogeography, geography and archaeology.

Vegetation Dynamics, Changing Ecosystems and Human Responsibility provides an overview of vegetation dynamics, which is the science of natural, near-natural, and human-influenced changes in vegetation over time and space. We can find chapters about almost every viewpoint of this very diverse segment of our science and in connection with almost every main type of terrestrial ecosystem.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the multiple strategies that plants have developed to cope with drought, one of the most severe environmental stresses. Experts in the field present 17 chapters, each of which focuses on a basic concept as well as the latest findings. The following major aspects are covered in the book: · Morphological and anatomical adaptations · Physiological responses · Biochemical and molecular responses · Ecophysiological responses · Responses to drought under field conditions The contributions will serve as an invaluable source of information for researchers and advanced students in the fields of plant sciences, agriculture, ecophysiology, biochemistry and molecular biology.

Effect of High Temperature on Crop Productivity and Metabolism of Macro Molecules presents a comprehensive overview on the direct effect of temperatures defined as "high", a definition which increasingly includes a great number of geographic regions. As temperature impacts the number of base growth days, it is necessary to adapt plant selection, strategize planting times, and understand the expected impact of adaptive steps to ensure maximum plant health and crop yield. Global warming, climate change and change in environmental conditions have become common phrases in nearly every scientific seminar, symposium and meeting, thus these changes in climatic patterns constrain normal growth and reproduction cycles. This book reviews the effect of high temperature on agricultural crop production and the effect of high temperature stress on the metabolic aspects of macro molecules, including carbohydrates, proteins, fats, secondary metabolites, and plant growth hormones. - Focuses on the effects of high temperature on agriculture and the metabolism of important macro-molecules - Discusses strategies for improving heat tolerance, thus educating plant and molecular breeders in their attempts to improve efficiencies and crop production - Provides information that can be applied today and in future research

This book provides a broad overview of the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) that can be used for smart farming applications, through either successful engineering or ground-breaking research. Among them, the highlighted tactics are soil management, water management, crop management, livestock management, harvesting, and the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) in smart farming. Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things in Smart Farming explores different types of smart framing systems for achieving sustainability goals in the real environment. The authors discuss the benefits of smart harvesting systems over traditional harvesting methods, including decreased labor requirements, increased crop yields, increased probabilities of successful harvests, enhanced visibility into crop health, and lower overall harvest and production costs. It explains and describes big data in terms of its potential five dimensions—volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and valuation—within the framework of smart farming. The authors also discuss the recent IoT technologies, such as fifth-generation networks, blockchain, and digital twining, to improve the sustainability and productivity of smart farming systems. The book identifies numerous issues that call for conceptual innovation and has the potential to progress machine learning (ML), resulting in significant impacts. As an illustration, the authors point out how smart farming offers an intriguing field for interpretable ML. The book then delves into the function of AI techniques, such as AI in accelerating the development of nano-enabled agriculture, thereby facilitating safe-by-design nanomaterials for various consumer products and medical applications. This book is for undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, and AI engineers who pursue a strong understanding of the practical methods of machine learning in the agriculture domain. Practitioners and stakeholders would be able to follow this book to understand the potential of ML in their farming projects and agricultural solutions. Features: • Explores different types of smart framing systems for achieving sustainability goals in the real environment • Explores ML-based analytics such as generative adversarial networks (GAN), autoencoders, computational imaging, and quantum computing • Examines the development of intelligent machines to provide solutions to real-world problems, emphasizing smart farming applications, which are not modeled or are extremely difficult to model mathematically • Emphasizes methods for better managing crops, soils, water, and livestock, urging investors and businesspeople to occupy the existing vacant market area • Discusses AI-empowered Nanotechnology for smart farming