Increasing food demand has exerted tremendous stress on agricultural water usages worldwide, often with a threat to sustainability in agricultural production and, hence, food security. Various resource-conservation technologies like conservation agriculture (CA) and water-saving measures are being increasingly adopted to overcome these problems. While these technologies provide some short- and long-term benefits of reduced labor costs, stabilized or increased crop yield, increased water productivity, and improved soil health at farm scale, their overall impacts on hydrology outcomes remain unclear at larger temporal and spatial scales. Although directly linked to the regional hydrological cycle, irrigation remains a less understood component. The ecological conditions arising from the hydrology outcomes of resource-conservation technologies are associated with sustainability in agricultural production. In this paper, the philosophies and benefits of resource-conservation technologies and expert perceptions on their impacts on temporal and spatial scales have been reviewed comprehensively focusing on regional hydrology outcomes in the Eastern Gangetic Plain (EGP). Due to data inadequacy and lack of knowledge-sharing among disciplines, little is yet known about actual water saving by these resource-conservation technologies and the level of their contribution in groundwater and surface water storage over large temporal and spatial scales. Inadequate knowledge of the hydrological effects of water applied in the agricultural field leads to the implementation of water management policy based on local perspectives only, often with the possibility of deteriorating the water-scarcity situation. Therefore, multidisciplinary future research should quantify regional hydrology outcomes by measuring the components of regional water balance in order to develop a proper water management policy for sustainable agricultural production.

中文翻译：

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节水农业技术：恒河东部平原的区域水文学成果与知识差距

不断增长的粮食需求给全世界的农业用水带来了巨大压力，通常威胁着农业生产的可持续性并因此威胁着粮食安全。为了克服这些问题，越来越多地采用各种资源保护技术，例如保护性农业（CA）和节水措施。尽管这些技术在降低劳动力成本，稳定或增加农作物产量，提高水生产率以及改善农场规模的土壤健康方面提供了短期和长期收益，但在更大的时空范围上，它们对水文成果的总体影响仍然不清楚。尽管灌溉与区域水文循环直接相关，但灌溉仍然是一个鲜为人知的组成部分。资源保护技术的水文成果所产生的生态条件与农业生产的可持续性有关。在本文中，对资源保护技术的理念和收益以及专家对其在时空尺度上的影响的看法进行了全面回顾，重点关注了东部恒河平原（EGP）的区域水文学成果。由于数据不足和各学科之间缺乏知识共享，因此对于这些资源节约技术的实际节水及其在较大的时空范围上对地下水和地表水存储的贡献水平知之甚少。对农业用水的水文影响的认识不足，导致仅基于当地观点实施水管理政策，常常有可能使缺水情况恶化。因此，多学科的未来研究应通过测量区域水平衡的组成部分来量化区域水文学成果，以便制定适当的水资源管理政策以实现可持续农业生产。