Review of Water-Smart Cereal Production Innovations Across Seven Major Crops

Mohamed Houssemeddine Sellami's narrative review synthesizes 110 studies on water-smart innovations for seven major cereal crops. The dataset, last updated in May 2026, presents pooled quantitative findings on interventions like deficit irrigation and straw mulching. It introduces a Genetics × Agronomy × Digital (G×A×D) integration framework for water productivity and climate resilience.

Use Cases

• Compare water-saving impacts of different irrigation techniques based on pooled findings for rice and wheat.
• Analyze yield trade-offs from water-smart practices based on reported percentage changes in yield and water productivity.
• Identify research gaps for specific crops or regions based on the noted thin evidence base for finger millet and sub-Saharan Africa.

Strengths

• Synthesizes findings from 110 studies, providing a consolidated evidence base.
• Quantifies effects of specific interventions, such as a ~23% reduction in irrigation water for rice using alternate wetting and drying.
• Covers seven major cereal crops relevant to global food security.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The evidence base for some applications, like IoT-based scheduling for cereals, is described as thin relative to horticulture.
• The dataset is very small at 25.6 KB, indicating limited primary data scope.

Provenance

Source

Mohamed Houssemeddine Sellami via figshare

Collection Method

Narrative review synthesized through a PRISMA-inspired selection workflow of 110 studies.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-15 12:32:40; freshness should be verified.