Impacts of Agricultural Practices on Concentrations and Fluxes of Dissolved Organic Carbon

Organic matter from the breakdown of plant and animal material is a significant concern for drinking water quality in California due to the potential formation of carcinogenic disinfection byproducts (DBPs) during water treatment with chlorine. Reducing DOC concentration at the source water is a possible management strategy being explored for the reduction of DBP precursors. We examined a variety of land use/land cover, i.e. natural grasslands and intensive agriculture in the Willow Slough Watershed (415 km2) in Yolo County, California to determine the temporal and spatial DOC dynamics. Surface water DOC concentrations ranged from 1.62 to 11.44 mg L-1 at the mouth of the watershed during the first two years, with about two times higher DOC concentrations measured downstream in an intensive agricultural subwatershed dominated by summer flood irrigation. The mean DOC yield was also the highest from the agricultural subwatershed at 0.74 g m-2 over the six months of active irrigation. Results suggest that there is a positive correlation between cropland area and DOC yield. Among many crop species examined, alfalfa showed the strongest positive linear relationship with R2 = 0.91 between the irrigation season DOC yield and percentage crop area of each subwatershed, indicating that agricultural practices such as flood irrigation have a greater impact on DOC loads than other irrigation systems. The results indicate that agricultural practices may deserve further attention for watershed management of DOC and DBP precursors and that flood irrigation practices should be targeted to reduce DOC loading within the main watershed.