Grey-system studies on agricultural ecoengineering in the Taihu Lake area, Jiangsu, China

✍ Scribed by Shuqing An; Jingsong Yan; Xusheng Yu

• Book ID: 103963641
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 560 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0925-8574
• DOI: 10.1016/0925-8574(96)00011-0

✦ Synopsis

A grey-system model was used to simulate and predict changes of nine key parameters in an agro-ecosystem and energy efficiencies of the crop subsystem in the area. The model, which satisfactorily fitted original data, predicted that population, energy production by crops in sum or per hectare, energy production by fishery, and energy input through machinery would increase, but that cropland area, energy production by livestocks and energy input through pesticides and herbicides would decrease. Energy input through fertilizers was predicted to fluctuate in the future. Energy efficiency, total and net energy allocation for people, would slow down in next ten years as the replacement of traditional agriculture by petroleum agriculture takes place. The grey catastrophic prediction model showed that two low energy production years or disaster years would be expected before year 2050, although the trend of the production would increase in future. The grey correlation coefficient showed that disaster years would emerge because short frost-free days, especially low temperature in the spring, would happen in those years.