ArticleNature communications2024
Field-scale crop water consumption estimates reveal potential water savings in California agriculture.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Benchmark Dataset of Agricultural Weather Stations over the Contiguous United States for Evapotranspiration Applications.Scientific data · 2026Article
- A 1-km Dataset of Water Consumption and Irrigation for Major Grain Crops in the Yellow River Basin Based on the Crop Water Production Function.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Sustainable global irrigation expansion could support only two-thirds of croplands under 1.5 °C and 3 °C warming.Nature food · 2026Article
- Human contributions to evapotranspiration mitigate swings in dry-to-wet year transitions.Communications sustainability · 2026Article
- Machine learning approaches for enhanced estimation of reference evapotranspiration (ETo): a comparative evaluation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Efficiently managing agricultural irrigation is vital for food security today and into the future under climate change. Yet, evaluating agriculture's hydrological impacts and strategies to reduce them remains challenging due to a lack of field-scale data on crop water consumption. Here, we develop a method to fill this gap using remote sensing and machine learning, and leverage it to assess water saving strategies in California's Central Valley. We find that switching to lower water intensity crops can reduce consumption by up to 93%, but this requires adopting uncommon crop types. Northern counties have substantially lower irrigation efficiencies than southern counties, suggesting another potential source of water savings. Other practices that do not alter land cover can save up to 11% of water consumption. These results reveal diverse approaches for achieving sustainable water use, emphasizing the potential of sub-field scale crop water consumption maps to guide water management in California and beyond.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.