Agriculture and Water Quality

Motivating Question: How can natural, agroecological infrastructure and reservoir system management coordinate to enhance semi-arid region response to hydrologic extremes, while effectively improving water quality?

As basins in semi-arid to arid regions of the Western U.S. continue to face extreme water shortages due to prolonged droughts as well as threats from increasing hurricane storms moving inland, reservoirs become an important control on the hydrologic regime. However, management of agricultural lands upstream and downstream of reservoirs is often not aligned with reservoir management for water resources, let alone water quality considerations. The collective management of these two operationally separate infrastructure systems (i.e., NABWI) may serve to improve both agricultural land and water quantity and quality in these systems.

We use an existing watershed model developed for the Trinity River Basin to explore collective management of agroecological infrastructure and built infrastructure. We compare agroecological interventions (changes in crop rotations, addition of cover crops, tillage, implementation of filter strips, and wetlands) with traditional reservoir management operations (release timing, hedging, dredging) to evaluate simulated water quality and quantity sensitivity to each action. We focus on “what-if'' scenarios to identify when and where within the watershed a collective management approach might be advantageous.