Research topics
- Lateral exchanges of groundwater among vegetation patches
- Ecohydrologic consequences of land-use change
- Effects of shallow groundwater on crop production
- Agricultural sustainability
Research methods
• Fieldwork (ecohydrological observatory, environmental monitoring)
• Numerical modeling
• Remote sensing
Research description
Understanding the impacts of land use on hydrological processes is critical to meeting global food security needs while protecting water resources and ecosystems. Society is increasingly forced to decide how agroecosystems fit into a complex mosaic of natural and anthropogenic land covers and effect landscape-scale sustainability. The goal of this project is to quantify the hydrological processes within and among interacting landscape patches using the Argentine Pampas ecosystem as an exemplar of flat agricultural regions. The water table is very shallow in the region and the area floods estensively during wet periods. What we are interested in is the affect of the various crops, cropping practices, pastures and planted forest patches on the hydrology of this system and how this shallow groundwater affects crop growth. Currently, water levels are relatively high, but these are always fluctuating – we want to know how much is caused by climate and how much is an impact of changing land use? Furthermore, are there other configurations of land-use that can enhance productivity and/or make the socioeconomic and ecologic system more resilient?
Collaborators working on this project
Esteban Jobbagy and his research group at the Universidad National en San Luis, Argentina
Links to news stories and blog posts
UW engineer models groundwater to help farmers at home and abroad
Funding
Fulbright Scholar Program