Human Health and Ecosystem Quality Benefits with Life Cycle Assessment Due to Fungicides Elimination in Agriculture

Industrial agriculture results in environmental burdens due to the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides. Fungicides is a class of pesticides whose application contributes (among others) to human toxicity and ecotoxicity. The European Union aims to increase organic agriculture. For this reason, this work aims to analyze climate change,...

Microwave remote sensing for agricultural drought monitoring: Recent developments and challenges

Agricultural droughts are extreme events which are often a result of interplays between multiple hydro-meteorological processes. Therefore, assessing drought occurrence, extent, duration and intensity is complex and requires the combined use of multiple variables, such as temperature, rainfall, soil moisture (SM) and vegetation state. The...

Perspective on satellite-based land data assimilation to estimate water cycle components in an era of advanced data availability and model sophistication

The beginning of the 21^st century is marked by a rapid growth of land surface satellite data and model sophistication. This offers new opportunities to estimate multiple components of the water cycle via satellite-based land data assimilation (DA) across multiple scales. By resolving more processes in land surface models and by...

Soft Robotic Grippers for Crop Handling or Harvesting: A Review

Nowadays, harvesting delicate and high-value fruits, vegetables and edible fungi requires a large input of manual human labor. The relatively low wages and many health problems the workforce faces make this profession increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, robotic systems that selectively harvest crops are being developed. Whilst the moving platform...

Detecting forest response to droughts with global observations of vegetation water content

Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. At the...

Radar Remote Sensing of Agricultural Canopies: A Review

Observations from spaceborne radar contain considerable information about vegetation dynamics.The ability to extract this information could lead to improved soil moisture retrievals and the increased capacity to monitor vegetation phenology and water stress using radar data.The purpose of this review paper is to provide an overview of the...