Growing season water and salt migration between abandoned lands and adjacent croplands in arid and semi-arid irrigation areas in shallow water table environments

Geng Liu, Chaozi Wang, Xianghao Wang, Zailin Huo and Jiarong Liu

Agricultural Water Management, 2022, vol. 274, issue C

Abstract: In arid and semi-arid irrigation areas with shallow water tables and fragmented arrangement of croplands and abandoned lands, dry drainage could be an optional management practice mitigating soil salinization. A dry drainage system lets non-irrigated abandoned lands serve as evaporative salt sinks receiving water and salt fluxes from adjacent irrigated croplands. Therefore, this research takes a typical dry drainage unit in the Hetao Irrigation District—one abandoned land and its adjacent croplands—as an example to directly reveal the field scale water and salt migration between abandoned lands and adjacent croplands. It was found that during the growing season, the water input, i.e. field irrigation and precipitation, raised the water table of the croplands and drove water and salt migration from croplands to the abandoned lands. However, the evapotranspiration in the croplands was also larger than that in the abandoned lands. Thus, during the intervals of irrigation (the “phreatic evaporation periods”), in some circumstances, evapotranspiration could drive water and salt flux from the abandoned lands to the croplands, which would influence the groundwater salinity of the croplands. Therefore, it is recommended to plant halophytes on the abandoned lands to enhance its evapotranspiration and hinder the water and salt flux from the abandoned lands to the croplands during intervals of irrigation. This management practice could help form more effective dry drainage systems between abandoned lands and adjacent croplands, and help better control the root zone salinity of the croplands.

Keywords: Dry drainage; Farmland; Fallow area; Salinity; Groundwater; Lateral flow (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377422005157
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:274:y:2022:i:c:s0378377422005157

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2022.107968

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().