Agricultural resource efficiency and reduction of impacts under land-use and climate change scenarios in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Schwantes, Ana Paula
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/11/11136/tde-02102017-094321/
• topic: Balanço hídrico; Cerrado; Cerrado; Land and water productivity; Modelo SWAP; Produtividade da terra e da água; SWAP model; Water balance

Cerrado is the second largest Brazilian biome and originally corresponded to 24% of the national territory, and since the 1970´s has been under agriculture and cattle activities. Soybean and maize are two of the most important grain-crops found in this region, with an estimated production of approximately 223 millions of tons in the Brazilian 2016/17 harvest. Changes in soil physical properties due to soil management affect productivity. Possible changes in climatic variables may also affect agricultural productivity, either per unit area (land productivity) or per unit of water volume (water productivity). One option for studying the relation between land and water productivity and how they are affected by soil hydraulic properties and climatic factors is by using an agro-hydrological model. In this study, the aim was to quantify aspects of the soil water balance and to make estimates of land and water productivity for soybean in a clay soil and maize in a medium texture in the Cerrado region using SWAP simulations for different irrigation strategies. Effects on agricultural productivity of a climatic prevision with increasing the air temperature and rainfall reduction for the years 2016-2040 were also simulated. Results show that an increase of soil porosity, resulting from a conservation tillage management, leads to a higher infiltration capacity and is shown to increase land and water productivity, when associated to irrigation scenarios. Higher water productivities were observed with only supplementary irrigation. Predicted climate changes will lead to a decrease of approximately 20% by the end of the years 2016-2040 in land productivity, under rainfed conditions.