Abstract
Winter vegetables, including lettuce, are a significant consumptive use of water in the Lower Colorado River Basin. Precise irrigation management is needed to increase water use efficiency and reduce the negative impacts of suboptimal irrigation, including nutrient leaching, crop stress, and crop pathogens. However, lettuce has multiple features that make accurate evapotranspiration (ET) modeling difficult, including asynchronicity with meteorological evaporative demand, short growing seasons, and a shallow root zone that increases the risk of using an incorrect ET value. To improve ET modeling and understand applied irrigation effectiveness for lettuce in this region, we used an energy and water balance bio-physical model, Backward-Averaged Iterative Two-Source Surface temperature and energy balance Solution (BAITSSS) on arid farmlands in the lower Colorado River basin. The study was conducted between 2016 and 2020 at twelve eddy covariance (EC) sites in lettuce with a wide range of soil physical properties. BAITSSS was implemented using ground-based weather and irrigation data, and remote sensing-based vegetation indices (Sentinel-2). The model accuracy varied among sites, with a mean cumulative seasonal ET of ~ 3% and mean RMSE of 1.1 mm d−1 when compared to EC. The results showed that accurate timing and amount of applied water (irrigation and precipitation) were critical to capturing ET spikes right after irrigation and tracking the continuous decrease of ET. This study highlighted the dominant factors that influence the ET of lettuce and how BAITSSS can improve ET modeling for irrigation management.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. 2020-69012-31914 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. This research was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (project numbers 2036-61000-018-000-D and 2020-13660-008-000-D). This research used resources provided by the SCINet project of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, ARS project number 0500-00093-001-00-D. The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, and where applicable, sex, marital status, familial status, parental status, religion, sexual orientation, genetic information, political beliefs, reprisal, or because all or part of an individual's income is derived from any public assistance program. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of program information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.) should contact USDA's TARGET Center at (202) 720-2600 (voice and TDD). To file a complaint of discrimination, write to USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410, or call (800) 795-3272 (voice) or (202) 720-6382 (TDD). USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
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R.D, R.G.A, and A.F. designed and performed research, analyzed data, and originated manuscript; M.S. and C.A.S. contributed data; E.S. guided project development. All authors reviewed and revised the manuscript.
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Supplementary file1 (PNG 69 KB) Fig. S1 Water balance components of lettuce for various sites over multiple years (2016–2020) at the Colorado River Basin region. Hatches show the cumulative water when NDVI < 0.3
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Supplementary file2 (PNG 167 KB) Fig. S2 Time series of hourly surface temperature between infrared thermometer (IRT) and derived from BAITSSS model
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Dhungel, R., Anderson, R.G., French, A.N. et al. Assessing evapotranspiration in a lettuce crop with a two-source energy balance model. Irrig Sci 41, 183–196 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-022-00814-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-022-00814-x