Water balance of the olive tree-annual crop association: A modeling approach

J. Abid Karray, J.P. Lhomme, M.M. Masmoudi and N. Ben Mechlia

Agricultural Water Management, 2008, vol. 95, issue 5, 575-586

Abstract: Water transfers within mixed crops systems are complicated to understand due to the large number of complex interactions between the various components. Standard techniques fail to provide the proper assessment of the components of the water balance. Experiments and modeling developments are used to understand the dynamics of water transfers within the association of olive trees with annual crops under irrigation in Central Tunisia. The whole system is represented by a unit area made up of three components: a plot with the annual crop, a plot with the olive tree and a plot of bare soil. The modeling approach is based on the concept of reservoir. The model works on a daily time step and accounts for the lateral transfers of water occurring between the components of the system: (i) the water uptake by the roots of olive trees; (ii) the physical flow of water between the irrigated plot and the non-irrigated ones. A field experiment was carried out during 2 years (2002, 2003) and three crop cycles (spring potato, spring pea and autumn potato) in order to calibrate the model and test its validity. Olive tree transpiration was estimated from sap flow measurements and soil moisture in the different compartments was measured by neutron probe technique. The experimental data compare fairly well with the model outputs. The first purpose of the model is to understand the functioning of the olive tree-annual crop association from a water standpoint, but it can be easily extended to other intercropping systems mixing perennial vegetation with annual crops or used as a management tool. The estimates of the water extracted by the olive trees in each reservoir appear to be much more significant than those of the water physically transferred between reservoirs.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(07)00321-6
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:95:y:2008:i:5:p:575-586

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 ().