Tracking Water Parcels as They Move Through Agricultural Watersheds
Abstract
Identification of management practices that can reduce agricultural impacts on water and air quality has proven to be a difficult challenge for farmers, regulators, and scientists. Nitrate lost from the Midwestern US Corn Belt is the primary cause of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is the principal determinant of N2O emissions from freshwater streams, which have been shown in recent research to be substantially greater than IPCC estimates. Agronomic research efforts to address the problem have focused primarily on small plot trials, comparing one management practice against another and attempting to measure reactive N losses. These can be difficult experiments to conduct and interpret, which is one reason there has been negligible progress in identifying solutions. We describe a different approach, in which nitrate concentration and related water quality parameters are measured continuously from a GPS-equipped kayak as it moves through a watershed, generating a water quality map that can be used in conjunction with GIS data on land use, topography, and management practices to assess the water and air quality impacts of those practices.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.H43Q2309B
- Keywords:
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- 1848 Monitoring networks;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1871 Surface water quality;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1879 Watershed;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY