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Introduction
I'm an agronomic engineer from the National Agronomic Institute (Tunisia, 2000). I hold a Master's Degree from the Paris-Grignon National Agronomic Institute (2003). I obtained my PhD in Continental Environmental Biochemistry and Ecology from University Pierre and Marie Curie (2006, France). I have focused on using isotopic techniques to study the turnover of soil organic matter. Since January 2007 I have been working as a senior soil scientist for the National Research Institute for Rural Engin
Additional affiliations
January 2007 - April 2016
National Research Institute for Rural Engineering, Water, and Forestry
Position
- Resarcher
Publications
Publications (64)
In-season wheat growing area identification is of great importance for monitoring crop growth conditions and predicting related yield. In this study, we developed an approach to map wheat crops at a regional scale, using both the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR, Sentinel-1, S1) and Copernicus Optical (Sentinel-2, S2) satellite data, to estimate the e...
Achieving sustainability goals in agricultural value chains includes, among others, recycling agro-industrial solid waste into effective bio-fertilizers that reduce reliance on chemical inputs. Prickly pear seed cake (POC) and date seed cake (DOC) are wastes from agro-industrial processes that have the potential to be valorized as biofertilizers du...
Land suitability maps are useful tools for protecting soil resources. The main objective of this study was to elaborate and assess soil suitability maps for different rainfed and irrigated crops. This study was conducted in the North-East area of Tunisia, three speculations were adopted (Cereals, arboriculture and vegetable crops) in both rainfed a...
A growing urban population and dietary changes increased wheat import bills in Africa to 9% per year. Though wheat production in the continent has been increasing over the past decades, to varying degrees depending on regions, this has not been commensurate with the rapidly increasing demand for wheat. Analyses of wheat yield gaps show that there i...
The improvement of soil fertility properties is a priority for meeting sustainable development goals and world food security. One potential benefit of using paper sludge in agriculture is the reduction of waste and associated environmental impacts. By using paper sludge as a soil amendment, it is possible to divert away this material from landfills...
Improving legumes crops’ performance under dense stands shade environment (e.g., intercropped oats–clover) is needed to promote agroecological practices. Previous studies have revealed that ethylene produced by plants under dense standing conditions is among other factors that affect crops’ growth performance and reduce legumes’ ability to fix nitr...
Scenarios serve science by testing the sensitivity of a system and/or society to adapt to the future. In this study, we present a new land use scenario methodology called ScenaLand. This methodology aims to develop plausible and contrasting land use and management (LUM) scenarios, useful to explore how LUM (e.g. soil and water conservation techniqu...
Better knowledge of the amount and spatial distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) stock at national level is a key element for monitoring, planning and decision-making regarding soil quality management, agriculture or carbon storage options. The present study proposes for the first time a Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) initiative to map SOC stocks i...
Due to the climate change situation, water deficit stress is becoming one of the main factors that threatens the agricultural sector in semi-arid zones. Thus, it is extremely important to provide efficient tools of water deficit monitoring and early detection. To do so, a set of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscattering and interferometric SAR...
Conservation agriculture based on no-tillage (NT) and crop rotation allows to enhance soil health. Based on data collected from long-term trials in a semi-arid region of Tunisia, results showed that NT increased significantly soil organic carbon stock (SOCS), soil microbial biomass carbon (SMBC), arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) root colonizatio...
The monitoring of cereal productions, mainly through yield estimations, has played an important role in providing reliable information to decision makers in order to ensure the proper management of agricultural markets. In this context, remote sensing, which allows the coverage of large areas, is an important source of information that complements...
This chapter examines the adoption and spread of Conservation Agriculture in North Africa. The chapter begins by providing an overview of the geography, soil, climate and farming environment in North Africa before moving on to discuss the importance of agriculture and food security in the North African economy. The chapter then moves on to examine...
This book is about Conservation Agriculture (the use of no tillage systems) to preserve soil structure and integrity. It has become an increasingly important step towards sustainable farming. This publication brings together conservation agriculture and climate smart decision making processes for the first time, focusing on Africa. This book brings...
The implementation of conservation agriculture (CA) remains crucial for facing interannual variability in climatic conditions that impact durum wheat production and food security. The current work was conducted to assess the effects of the tillage practice, previous crop, and nitrogen (N) fertilization rate on the agronomic and economic performance...
Conservation agriculture has been proposed as an alternative to conventional agriculture to mitigate the climate change impact and ensure food security. This study examined the effect of three tillage systems, ((conventional tillage (CT), chisel tillage (ChT) and no tillage (NT)) and two crop-rotation systems ((two year crop rotation (2-yr) and thr...
Boosting the productivity of smallholder farming systems continues to be a major need in Africa. Challenges relating to how to improve irrigation are multi-factor and multisectoral, and they involve a broad range of actors who must interact to reach decisions collectively. We provide a systematic reflection on findings from the research project EAU...
Boosting the productivity of smallholder farming systems continues to be a major need in Africa. Challenges relating to how to improve irrigation are multi-factor and multisectoral, and they involve a broad range of actors who must interact to reach decisions collectively. We provide a systematic reflection on findings from the research project EAU...
Several circulation models are forecasting climate changes in the Mediterranean region. Accordingly, it is expected that water scarcity in the region will be higher with drastic shifts of hydrological and erosive watershed responses. In Tunisia, wheat yields have been variable over the years and are lower than the potential yields. In response, the...
A meta-analysis of the effects of nitrogen fertilization on yield and nitrogen use efficiency of durum wheat in Tunisia In Tunisia, durum wheat occupies important areas but its production remains low despite the effort of intensification of this crop undertaken for numerous decades. Nitrogen nutrition is one of the factors limiting the durum wheat...
In Tunisia, agriculture intensification is based on an agricultural production system characterized by excessive use of inputs and natural resources as water and soils. Therefore, it is essential to opt for conservation practices such as no-tillage (NT). However, in order to facilitate NT adoption at large scale it is necessary to use some methods...
Wheat stands as the major source of food for most of the Tunisian population.
The soil organic matter (SOM) appears to play a remarkable role in sustaining four major ecosystem services: resistance to soil erosion, soil water retention, soil fertility for plants, and soil biodiversity.
n Tunisia, water erosion is a complex phenomenon affecting agricultural land mainly in the north of the country. This phenomenon poses a threat to the sustainability of cereal production in Tunisia through the loss of soil resources. The first step was to identify an indicator of soil sensitivity to water erosion such as soil aggregate stability. T...
I In Tunisia, cereal production is a major agriculture and socio-economic activity. Cereals have always occupied large areas and are still the main food resource for the population (durum wheat and bread wheat) or livestock (barley, oats hay, wheat straw,...). This explains, in part, the interest for cereals, and particularly durum wheat, in the Tu...
Soil aggregate stability is a key factor in soil resistance to water erosion, which is a threat to soils in a large part of northern Tunisia. The analysis of the spatial variability of soil aggregate stability provides both agronomic and environmentally useful information. However, extensive measurements of soil aggregate stability remain tedious a...
Erosion processes and land degradation are recognized as one of the most significant environmental problems worldwide. In the Mediterranean region, intense erosion processes occur as a consequence of complex interactions between environmental conditions (e.g. climate, lithology) and human-related factors (e.g. history of human activity, land use ch...
Erosion processes and land degradation are recognized as one of the most significant environmental problems worldwide. In the Mediterranean region, intense erosion processes occur as a consequence of complex interactions between environmental conditions (e.g. climate, lithology) and human-related factors (e.g. history of human activity, land use ch...
Erosion processes and land degradation are recognized as one of the most significant environmental problems worldwide. In the Mediterranean region, intense erosion processes occur as a consequence of complex interactions between environmental conditions (e.g. climate, lithology) and human-related factors (e.g. history of human activity, land use ch...
In this study, we investigated the situation of herbicide use in wheat in Northern Tunisia and its relation with the development of resistant weed populations. It is based on a synthesis of available data concerning Tunisian imported herbicide quantities, treated wheat areas and herbicides used by farms surveyed in Northern Tunisia and their correl...
Water and soil resources of Mediterranean agrosystems are strongly influenced by global change. The sustainable management of these resources requires innovative strategies from field to territory scales. Our knowledge and understanding about factors influencing hydrological cycle is still weak and deficient, which hampers the implementation of int...
Abstract
Increasing populations demanding more and better food, changing climates and limited fertile land for crop area expansion require greater rigor in identifying and quantifying where and how crop yields can be improved. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, limited water resources further exacerbate the challenge of providing a...
Within Mediterranean rural areas, soil and water resources are facing increasing pressures in relation to changes in anthropogenic and climate forcing. Current strategies for resource management have to be redesigned in order to mitigate existing competitions and to propose adaptation solutions. New strategies to be explored include the combination...
The characterization of soil aggregate stability is an important step for assessing the susceptibility of soil to water erosion. A normalized international method has recently been proposed for estimating soil aggregate stability indexes (ISO/FDIS 10930, 2012), but extensive measurements of the soil aggregate stability for mapping erosion risks on...
In Tunisia, cereals are grown on 1.5 million hectares mainly in the upper northern part of the country in areas with mean annual rainfall ranging from 200 to 800mm. Durum wheat is the major crop and the most widely cultivated cereal. Yields vary greatly from year to year and across time as well. The country has to import cereal as the production is...
For the last decades, the fate of lignins in soil was analyzed mainly with cupric oxide (CuO) oxidation, which is traditionally used to quantify soil lignin content and characterize its state of degradation. This method presents limitations due to incomplete depolymerization of the lignin structure. In this study, we used a physicochemical soil lig...
Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays an important role in enhancing crop
production and mitigating additional greenhouse gas emissions. In fact,
the assessment of the amount of SOC at the regional scale is important
to better understand the role of the SOC reservoir in global climate and
environmental issues. Besides, the vertical SOC profile may be of...
In this paper, farm level technical efficiency of production and its determinants are investigated in a sample of 51 cereal producing farms located in the main cereal production region in Tunisia using a stochastic frontier production model. Empirical findings show that labor input factor appears with a minimal effect on the production. The hypothe...
This paper investigates farm level technical efficiency of production and its determinants in a sample of 51 cereal producing farms in Tunisia that focus on wheat production. The empirical findings show that the labor input factor has a minimal effect on production. In addition, the technical efficiency of wheat production in the sample varied wide...
L’épandage des boues des stations d’épuration des eaux usées sur le sol est conditionné par leur valeur agronomique et leur innocuité
vis-à-vis du sol et des eaux. L’objectif de ce travail était de comparer l’effet d’une boue fraîche (BF) et d’une boue compostée (BC) sur
les propriétés de mouillabilité et de stabilité structurale d’un sol limono-ar...
CuO oxidation is traditionally used for soil lignin study, although, like other degradation methods it might give access only to a part of the lignin polymers. For structural characterization, lignins are conventionally isolated from plant material by combining ball-milling, cellulolysis and solvent extraction to recover a milled wall enzymatic lig...
Lignins are one of the most abundant plant molecules in soils and are considered as having a great impact on the soil organic matter (SOM) content and fate. However, the dynamics and turnover of lignins in soils are not clear on the long-term basis. Some studies suggest that lignins turnover could be faster than that of the bulk SOM (Lobe et al., 2...
Intercropping, a system allowing to increase durum wheat production and to maintain soil fertility in Northern Tunisia?
Bahri, H(1,2)., Annabi, M(2,3)., Ouerghi, K(2)., Rumpel, C(4)., Bedoussac, L(5), Justes, E(5), Latiri, K(2).
(1) INRGREF, rue Hédi Karray Ariana, Tunisie.
(2) Laboratoire d’Agronomie, INRAT, rue Hédi Karray Ariana, Tunisie.
(3)...
Organic status and microbial respiration in Northern Tunisian soils. The soil organic matter content is an important characteristic of soils fertility. It is also a characteristic more and more wanted in a global context of climate change, where the storage of the carbon in soil is a serious alternative to limit the CO2 emissions into atmosphere. T...
The soil organic matter content is an important characteristic of soils fertility. It is also a characteristic more and more wanted in a global context of climate change, where the storage of the carbon in soil is a serious alternative to limit the CO2 emissions into atmosphere. Thirty-five soils located in North Tunisia (25 cultivated soils and 10...
CuO oxidation is traditionally used for soil lignin study, although, like other degradation methods it might give access only to a part of the lignin polymers. For structural characterization, lignins are conventionally isolated from plant material by combining ball-milling, cellulolysis and solvent extraction to recover a milled wall enzymatic lig...
Recent in situ13C studies suggest that lignin is not stabilised in soil in its polymerised form. However, the fate of its transformation products remains unknown. The objective of the present research was to provide the first comprehensive picture of the fate of lignin-derived C across its transformations processes: (1) C remaining as undecomposed...
Lignin has long been suspected to be a major source of stable carbon in soils, notably because of the recalcitrant nature of its polyphenolic structure relative to other families of plant molecules. However, lignin turnover studies have produced conflicting results, most of them suggesting that large proportions of plant-residue lignin decompose wi...
Lignin transformation and decomposition products are generally considered a major source of stable soil organic matter (SOM). Nevertheless this process remains poorly understood in part because lignin is a heterogeneous biopolymer composed of several types of phenol monomers, which potentially display specific and contrasting decomposition kinetics...
Plant residues incorporated into soils are subjected to contrasted stabilization and biodegradation processes and may contribute to pools of soil organic matter (SOM) displaying different turnover times. Little is known about the relationship between the chemical structure of plant macromolecules and their long-term turnover in soils. Our research...