Agronomical Approaches to Increase Water Use Efficiency in Tree Crops

Call for Papers

Water availability is one of the major factors regulating the distribution of plant species and also one of the major limitations to plant productivity. Currently, over 35% of world's land surface is considered to be under arid or semiarid conditions, receiving inadequate rainfall for most agricultural uses. Global food security is directly linked to an increasing drought risk because of global climate change and a growing human population. In this context, farmers will have to grow plants with higher water use efficiency, employ water-saving irrigation strategies, or irrigate with low-quality irrigation water. The latter may comprise recycled water from industry or domestic use, which can contain high concentration of salt, boron, or heavy metals. Plants exposed to these stress conditions may respond with reduced yield and fruit quality. Thus, a major challenge in agriculture is to increase food production with less water or using low quality water by promoting agronomical techniques, cropping systems or new varieties of higher water use efficiency.

We invite investigators to contribute original research papers and review articles that evaluate agronomical strategies to increase crop production under different abiotic stress conditions such as drought, salinity, boron excess, and heavy metal toxicity. We are interested in articles that combine yield and fruit quality data with nutritional, physiological, and biochemistry measurements, testing mechanistic and realistic hypotheses. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Genotypes in rootstocks, varieties, and so forth
• Agronomical techniques such as shade screen, mulching, and irrigation
• Irrigation management techniques
• Fertilization management
• Mycorrhizal plant

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ija/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ija/wtc/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Francisco García-Sánchez, Department of Plant nutrition, CEBAS-CSIC, Espinardo, Murcia, Spain

Guest Editors

• Juan C. Melgar, Department of Agriculture, Agribusiness, and Environmental Sciences, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Kingsville, TX, USA
• Juan G. Perez-Perez, Department of Citriculture IMIDA, La Alberca, Spain
• Vicente Gimeno, Department of Agronomy, Biotechnology Laboratory, ISA University, Santiago, Dominican Republic