Effects of crop residue on soil and plant water evaporation in a dryland cotton system

Abstract

Dryland agricultural cropping systems emphasize sustaining crop yields with limited use of fertilizer while conserving both rain water and the soil. Conservation of these resources may be achieved with management systems that retain residues at the soil surface simultaneously modifying both its energy and water balance. A conservation practice used with cotton grown on erodible soils of the Texas High Plains is to plant cotton into chemically terminated wheat residues. In this study, the partitioning of daily and seasonal evapotranspiration (Et) into soil and plant water evaporation was compared for a conventional and a terminated-wheat cotton crop using the numerical model ENWATBAL. The model was configured to account for the effects of residue on the radiative fluxes and by introducing an additional resistance to latent and sensible heat fluxes derived from measurements of wind speed and vapor conductance from a soil covered with wheat-stubble. Our results showed that seasonalEt was similar in both systems and that cumulative soil water evaporation was 50% ofEt in conventional cotton and 31% ofEt in the wheat-stubble cotton. Calculated values ofEt were in agreement with measured values. The main benefit of the wheat residues was to suppress soil water evaporation by intercepting irradiance early in the growing season when the crop leaf area index (LAI) was low. In semiarid regions LAI of dryland cotton seldom exceeds 2 and residues can improve water conservation. Measured soil temperatures showed that early in the season residues reduced temperature at 0.1 m depth by as much as 5°C and that differences between systems diminished with depth and over time. Residues increased lint yield per unit ofEt while not modifying seasonalEt and reducing cumulative soil water evaporation.