Author:

Abstract:

Upgrading water use efficiency (WUE) is crucial to assure food production for the growing world population with limited land and water resources. Adapted field management is one of the key solutions to upgrade WUE for rainfed agriculture in drought prone regions. However field management strategies should be assessed taking into account climate change as well as the impact of field management on catchment hydrology. The presented doctoral research aims to develop a general calculation procedure to evaluate the impact of field management on WUE and catchment hydrology for current and future climatic conditions. The procedure should be widely applicable, generally relevant, i.e. also for developing countries, and require a relatively small number of explicit parameters and mostly-intuitive input variables. To obtain such a calculation procedure a crop water productivity model (AquaCrop) will be linked to hydrological models. By means of field experimental data, the AquaCrop model will be further refined and validated for the effect of field management on crop production and WUE. The linkage between crop and hydrological models will be studied for the Grote Nete catchment using lumped conceptual hydrological models (VHM, PDM, NAM). Later the gained knowledge will be applied to a case study in the Nile basin. Thereby different field management scenarios will be investigated with respect to their effect on WUE and catchment hydrology. Finally, modeling will also be conducted for future climate scenarios, assessing the impact of adapted field management in the future