Overview of water-saving irrigation methods in arid/semi-arid areas

Abstract

Water-saving strategies play an important role in improving the resilience of water scarcity in arid and semi-arid areas. This paper has compared the advantages and disadvantages of four kinds of water-saving irrigation methods commonly used in arid/semi-arid areas: rainwater harvesting irrigation, plastic film mulching technology, deficit irrigation, and alternate furrow irrigation. The finding of this study is that biological water-saving which can improve the biological drought tolerance is more cost-effective of further study than the technological water-saving. It can be seen that the latter two (biological water-saving irrigation measures) have lower cost, stronger operability and more promising development prospects. Im addition, future research is suggested to focus more on automatic intelligence to pursue accurate irrigation.