Water and Agriculture

Cannabis and residential groundwater pumping impacts on streamflow and ecosystems in Northern California

Cannabis is an emerging agricultural frontier, but due to its quasi-legal status its environmental impacts are poorly understood. Where cannabis is irrigated by groundwater, pumping can lead to streamflow depletion in surrounding streams which may …

Comparing the effects of climate and land use on surface water quality using future watershed scenarios

Eutrophication of freshwaters occurs in watersheds with excessive pollution of phosphorus (P). Factors that affect P cycling and transport, including climate and land use, are changing rapidly and can have legacy effects, making future freshwater …

Combining Evapotranspiration and Soil Apparent Electrical Conductivity Mapping to Identify Potential Precision Irrigation Benefits

Precision irrigation optimizes the spatiotemporal application of water using evapotranspiration (ET) maps to assess water stress or soil apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) maps as a proxy for plant available water content. However, ET and ECa …

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 …