Soil Water Technology for Solar Farming in Arid Regions

Alvin J.M. Smucker^1* and Nassar Mahmoud Ahmed Elmadhoun²

¹Michigan State University, USA
²Kaust University, Saudi Arabia

Large regions of the Middle East contain marginal soils receiving little rainfall. Energy required for adequate desalinization and irrigation often limit production and food value chain distribution. New highly efficient Pozzolan desalination technologies are being developed to provide abundant water supplies for expanding irrigation of solar agriculture in deserts. Although large pores within sand and Oxisolic soils absorb large quantities of rainfall and/or irrigation, less than 20% of this soil water remains in plant root zones to depths of 60 cm. The remaining water drains more deeply, leaching plant nutrients, bacteria, pesticides, and endocrine disruptive compounds, into groundwater well below roots of most annual fruit and vegetable crops. Spatially installed double layered U-shaped water retention troughs directly below plant root zones retain nearly 100% of irrigation water in plant root zones for longer periods of time. These Soil Water Retaining Technology (SWRT) membranes double soil water contents in plant root zones providing optimal soil water, nutrient and oxygen, empowering crop production to achieve their maximum genetic potential. Therefore, we believe combining solar agriculture (SA) with SWRT membranes, a new SAWRT hybrid will established to deliver longer crop drought-free periods than achievable by irrigated control sands, transforming millions of marginal sandy landscapes into long-term sustainable agriculture technologies, overcoming food shortages while conserving water, energy, and protecting the environment. Growing populations are requiring nearly all countries to transform sands into long-term sustainable food production regions on billions of improved sustainable hectares of arid sands.

Biography:
Professor Dr. Smucker is an internationally awarded soil biophysics specialist at Michigan State University, a Visiting Professor at University of Wisconsin, University of Western Australia, The Scottish Agricultural College, Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, and China Agricultural University. He has multiple patents for quantifying soil dynamics used by scientists worldwide. His soil water retention and irrigation specializations established world record production of flooded rice, sugarcane, food grains, horticultural and commercial crops on highly permeable soils in the USA, China, Iraq, Iran, Taiwan and Turkey. His research has been conferred by four fellow awards by the AAAS, ASA, SSSA, ISRR.

Remote Sensing Techniques (INSAR) used to Quantify the Long-Term Impact of Coal Mining on Surface Movement

André Vervoort

KU Leuven, Belgium

All underground mining excavations lead to a certain impact to the surface and to the surface infrastructure, in particular when a total extraction method without backfill is being applied. In this paper the impact of the longwall method of deep coal seams in Belgium is studied. In the past, the extractive industry focused on the short-term impact. However, the concepts of sustainable mining require the study of the long-term impact of mining on its surroundings. Such studies are facilitated a lot by the availability of data by remote sensing techniques (INSAR), whereby data is available for large areas above and around old mining excavations. These data have the additional advantage that they are recorded on a regular and frequent basis, and that they are characterized by a dense network of reflectors.

The studies so far clearly showed that after the closure of the coal mines, there is initial a period of further residual subsidence, followed by an uplift of the surface. Although that the residual subsidence and uplift are approximately an order of magnitude smaller than the short-term subsidence, both long-term movements cannot be neglected. The subsidence and uplift are based on two different mechanisms. While the subsidence is mainly a mechanical stress-deformation process linked to the caving and including time-dependent aspects, the uplift is the result of the flooding of the deep underground. Hence, the shape of the surface subsidence is different from the shape of the uplift.

Biography:
André Vervoort obtained in 1987 his Ph.D. degree in Mining Engineering in Belgium, studying the roof behavior in coal longwalls. From 1988 till 1992 he worked in South Africa for COMRO (Chamber of Mines of South Africa - Research Organization) in the coal mining division, mainly studying strata control in room and pillar panels and pillar extraction panels. Since 1992 he is a professor at KU Leuven, Belgium, lecturing courses on rock mechanics, mining and geostatistics. He has a special interest in all aspects of sustainable mining, including the long-term impact.

Collection, Processing, and Storage of Native Seeds for Ecological Restoration

M. K. Suleiman^*, N. R. Bhat and T. M. Thomas

Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait

Faced with harsh and highly unpredictable climate, limited water availability and relatively short growing period, Kuwaitʼs native vegetation are under tremendous pressure from large environmental fluctuations over time. Prior to the Gulf War, rangeland deterioration in Kuwait resulted from overgrazing, off-road vehicular movements, uprooting of plants, sand encroachment, and drought. Post-Gulf War, the rangeland resources came under additional pressures such as physical disruption of soil by placement of mines, construction of bunkers, foxholes, and movement of heavy machinery, and petroleum oil pollution caused by large numbers of devastated oil wells. Such highly degraded rangelands are very slow to recover requiring several decades to re-establish naturally. Therefore, specific short-to-medium and long-term restoration measures are needed to accelerate vegetation regeneration. This will require large numbers of keystone native species to be planted or seeded.

Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) has been making concerted efforts to collect, process, test the quality and store seeds of keystone native species for use in ex-situ conservation and restoration of degraded ecosystems. In this regard, a year-round program has been developed to collect seeds from the wild based on seed maturity and quality. Additionally, several studies were conducted to develop efficient quality testing and storage protocol for these native seeds. KISR also established 15 ha of field plots of native plants for mass production of seeds and plants. These efforts have proved highly successful and efficient. The seeds produced in the field products are harvested, processed and maintained in short-, medium- and long-term storages for their future use in restoration of degraded ecosystems. The presentation will discuss KISR experience in this area and will highlight future strategy to meet planting material demands of conservation and ecological restoration projects.

Keywords: Ecological restoration, seed propagation, restoration seed bank, seed farming, biodiversity conservation.

Biography:
Dr. Suleiman is a Research Scientist and Program Manager of Desert Agriculture and Ecosystems Program at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. She acquired a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences (Thesis- Restoration Ecology of Acacia pachyceras in the State of Kuwait) from the University of Western Australia. She earned a B.Sc. Botany from Kuwait University and is a certified Desert Landscaper. She has led many research projects and authored several research papers in her main areas of research: conservation, restoration, rehabilitation, and standardization of propagation techniques for native plants of Kuwait for their utilization in landscape projects.

Detection and Interpretation of Ground Motion Areas with the A-DInSAR Time Series Analysis: Application to Different Engineering Geological Problems

Claudia Meisina^* and Roberta Bonì

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy

Recent advanced ground deformation investigations make use of satellite Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) data, a remote sensing tool, to examine the mechanisms of ground motion around the world. In the last two decades, Advanced Differential Synthetic-Aperture Radar (A-DInSAR) techniques have experienced a major development, which is mainly related to (i) the progress of the SAR data acquired by the COSMO-SkyMed satellites and the recent ESA Sentinel missions, that act at higher spatio-temporal resolution, and to (ii) the development of advanced processing algorithms. The improvements in the A-DInSAR technique need of an appropriate methodology to analyse extremely large datasets which consist of huge amounts of measuring points with high temporal resolution. This work contributes to address to these problems by exploiting the great potential contained in the A-DInSAR time series. A novel methodology was implemented in order to for the geological interpretation of Ground Motion Areas (GMA) and to distinguish different components of ground motion. This work is aimed also to present the contribution of data and information coming from A-DInSAR to different problems of the engineering geology: land subsidence due to groundwater exploitation, effects of swelling-shrinkage of clayey soils, estimation of hydrogeological parameters. Then, the work gives insight into the applicability of A-DInSAR to interesting case histories for the ground motion identification, monitoring and modelling.

Biography:
Claudia Meisina received her PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Pavia (Italy). Currently is associate professor in Engineering Geology at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of University of Pavia, where she leads the Laboratory of Engineering Geology. She has been a post-doc at the BRGM in France. She is actually involved in Liquefact Horizon 2020 Project. Research interests concern methodologies for the geological interpretation of satellite radar interferometric data for landslide and subsidence identification and monitoring and the role of land use in shallow landslide triggering. She published 60+ peer-reviewed papers in the field of engineering geology.