The 15^th annual meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS2018) has been successfully held in the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. One of the Hydrological Sessions — Hydrological Processes in Agricultural Lands (HS23) convened by Dr. Jun Niu from the Center for Agricultural Water Research in China (CAWR), has gained much attention from professors and researchers in Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd. (New Zealand), The Australian National University, Public Works Research Institute in Japan, Tsinghua University, The University of Hong Kong, Nanjing University of Information Science, and Xi’an Jiaotong University, among others.

Members from our CAWR center have participated actively in this conference. Professor Xiaomin Mao, as the invited speaker, gave a talk about an agro-Hydrological model for simulating water flow and solute transport in layered soil with crop growth; Dr. Jun Niu presented the response of crop water productivity to climate variations in the Heihe River basin; Dr. Fei Tian talked about the effects of irrigation schemes on transpiration; Dr. Liu Liu presented the assessment of water productivity under multi-model projected climate change scenarios in the irrigated area. Prof. Linjing Qiu from Xi’an Jiaotong University gave a talk about improving carbon sequestration by irrigation requirements of rainfed cropland in the Loess Plateau of China. Ph. D and Master students Meng Duan, Liuyue He, Jing Fu from our Center also shared their work about the effects of water deficit on photosynthetic characteristics of spring wheat under plastic-mulching and comparison of light response curve models, the optimization of spatial and temporal distribution of crop water consumption in middle reaches of Heihe River, and coupling of hydrological model and crop model to simulate water-carbon fluxes, respectively with posters. Jing Fu conducted another oral presentation about the simulation of vegetation dynamics of the Heihe River basin under changing environment. The topics of the other four posters were assessment of agriculture water resources carrying capacity, understanding the characteristics of groundwater and stream water using factor and Cluster analysis, estimation of future agriculture water demand under land use change and the impacts of irrigation methods on soil water percolation in paddy fields from China Agriculture University, Kangwon National University, Korea Rural Community Corporation, and Wuhan University. Dr. Jun Niu was invited to take part in the “Meeting the Experts” international student program and the evaluation of “Best Student Poster”.

Moreover, the CAWR Center members visited Prof. Tao Yan in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The academic cooperation initiatives on the agriculture and water resources were proposed during the visiting.