Water and Agriculture

Nonlinear groundwater influence on biophysical indicators of ecosystem services

Groundwater is a fundamental control on biophysical processes underpinning essential ecosystem services (ES). However, interactions and feedbacks among groundwater, climate and multiple ES remain less well understood. We investigated groundwater …

Continuous separation of land use and climate effects on the past and future water balance

Understanding the combined and separate effects of climate and land use change on the water cycle is necessary to mitigate negative impacts. However, existing methodologies typically divide data into discrete (before and after) periods, implicitly …

Scenarios reveal pathways to sustain future ecosystem services in an agricultural landscape

Sustaining food production, water quality, soil retention, flood, and climate regulation in agricultural landscapes is a pressing global challenge given accelerating environmental changes. Scenarios are stories about plausible futures, and scenarios …

Understanding relationships among ecosystem services across spatial scales and over time

Sustaining ecosystem services (ES), mitigating their tradeoffs and avoiding unfavorable future trajectories are pressing social-environmental challenges that require enhanced understanding of their relationships across scales. Current knowledge of ES …

Socio-environmental drought response in a mixed urban-agricultural setting: synthesizing biophysical and governance responses in the Platte River Watershed, Nebraska, USA

Ensuring global food and water security requires a detailed understanding of how coupled socio-environmental systems respond to drought. Using the Platte River Watershed in Nebraska (USA) as an exemplar mixed urban-agricultural watershed, we quantify …

The Influence of Legacy P on Lake Water Quality in a Midwestern Agricultural Watershed

Decades of fertilizer and manure applications have led to a buildup of phosphorus (P) in agricultural soils and sediments, commonly referred to as legacy P. Legacy P can provide a long-term source of P to surface waters where it causes …

Quantifying indirect groundwater-mediated effects of urbanization on agroecosystem productivity using MODFLOW-AgroIBIS (MAGI), a complete critical zone model

Sustainably accommodating future population growth and meeting global food requirements requires understanding feedbacks between ecosystems and belowground hydrological processes. Here, we introduce MODFLOW-AgroIBIS (MAGI), a new dynamic ecosystem …

Is groundwater recharge always serving us well? Water supply provisioning, crop production, and flood attenuation in conflict in Wisconsin, USA

Ecosystem service mapping can provide an avenue for making effective land management decisions in a holistic way. However, mapped quantities do not always appropriately represent the ecosystem services that are used by humans. We highlight this issue …

Drought effects on US maize and soybean production: spatiotemporal patterns and historical changes

Maximizing agricultural production on existing cropland is one pillar of meeting future global food security needs. To close crop yield gaps, it is critical to understand how climate extremes such as drought impact yield. Here, we use gridded, daily …

Untangling the effects of shallow groundwater and soil texture as drivers of subfield-scale yield variability

Water table depth (WTD), soil texture, and growing season weather conditions all play critical roles in determining agricultural yield; however, the interactions among these three variables have never been explored in a systematic way. Using a …