Groundwater service markets are important and dynamic institutions that provide water to a wide range of farmers in many regions. However, these institutions represent arenas of complex and often antagonistic relations, which determine which farmers gain access to water and how. This study analyses the emergence and functioning of groundwater servi...
Introducing permanently an associated crop in rubber plantations may improve biodiversity and soil cover, optimize resource use, and diversify farmer's income. However, the associated crop may also compete with the rubber trees for resources such as space and water. The case of bamboo-rubber agroforestry system is peculiar, as bamboos present featu...
Basé sur des cas d'étude au Sénégal, ce chapitre dresse le bilan de 15 années de recherches sur le fonctionnement des sols d'agrosystèmes associant plantes cultivées (milarachide) et arbustes natifs au Sahel. Les travaux, publiés pour la plupart, ont montré que Guiera senegalensis et Piliostigma reticulatum redistribuent l'eau dans le sol, stimulen...
Food insecurity is a recurrent problem in northern Ghana. Food grown during the rainy season is often insufficient to meet household food needs, with some households experiencing severe food insecurity for up to five months in a year. Flood recession agriculture (FRA) – an agricultural practice that relies on residual soil moisture and nutrients le...
The link between phenotypic plasticity and heterosis is a broad fundamental question, with stakes in breeding. We report a case-study evaluating temporal series of wood ring traits of hybrid larch (Larix decidua × L. kaempferi and reciprocal) in relation to soil water availability. Growth rings record the tree plastic responses to past environmenta...
This paper presents HydroShoot, a leaf-based functional-structural plant model (FSPM) that simulates gas-exchange rates of complex plant canopies under water deficit conditions. HydroShoot is built assuming that simulating both the hydraulic structure of the shoot together with the energy budget of individual leaves is the asset for successfully sc...
Despite the widely held assumption that trees negatively affect the local water budget in densely planted tree plantations, we still lack a clear understanding of the underlying processes by which canopy cover influences local soil water dynamics in more open, humid tropical ecosystems. In this study, we propose a new conceptual model that uses a c...
In the Sahel, crop growth and yield are strongly linked to climate fluctuations. The low and erratic rainfall the Sahel region has experienced for several years led to poor harvests, associated with dramatic food crises and famines. Consequently, numerous studies were conducted to develop innovative techniques to estimate crop yield based on satell...
Cover crops are increasingly used in agriculture to provide a variety of ecosystem services (e.g. reducing nitrogen leaching, storing carbon in soils) during fallow periods, but it can be challenging to successfully establish them in summer, when water availability may be low. Thus, it is crucial to better quantify, understand and predict the emerg...
Cover crops provide ecosystem services such as storing atmospheric carbon in soils after incorporation of their residues. Cover crops also influence soil water balance, which can be an issue in temperate climates with dry summers as for example in southern France and Europe. As a consequence, it is necessary to understand cover crops' long‐term inf...
