CAREER: Re-engineering Agricultural Drainage Infrastructure: Upscaling In-field Conservations for Regional Sustainability

Agricultural drainage systems (ADS) are networks of engineered channels and ditches that have been widely implemented in low relief terrain, such as the Midwest, to manage water, remove excess soil moisture, and increase food and biofuel production. However, ADS also efficiently divert excess water and agricultural wastes from fields into natural river networks, causing adverse environmental impacts including streamflow regime change, water quality deterioration, and aquatic habitat degradation.

Understanding and managing regional scale hydrologic and environmental impacts influenced by field scale agricultural drainage systems has remained elusive. The overarching goals of this CAREER project are to 1) identify the coupled natural and engineered drainage networks (CNEDN) including natural rivers and agricultural drainage channels, and 2) investigate the role of CNEDN in upscaling field-scale agricultural water management practices to enhance regional water sustainability.

The successful completion of this project will benefit society by advancing the fundamental understanding, prediction, and management of coupled natural river and engineered drainage networks with the goal of enhancing regional agriculture and water sustainability. Additional benefits to society will be achieved through student education and training including the mentoring of one graduate student at Arizona State University.

Agriculture in the Midwest is experiencing rapid changes including the switching from food production to biofuel production, expansion of irrigation to mitigate drought impacts, and adoption of resource recovery techniques including nitrogen and phosphorus recovery. However, there are critical knowledge gaps in identifying and characterizing the agricultural drainage systems thereby hindering understanding of hydrologic impacts from farm scale to regional scale and limiting the capability of re-engineering the agricultural infrastructure for environmental sustainability under changing climate and socioeconomic drivers.

This CAREER project will address these knowledge gaps. The specific objectives of the research are to (1) delineate agricultural drainage networks by developing efficient and validated algorithms to capture drainage channel features from high resolution terrain data, (2) improve the capability of hydrologic models to simulate the hydrologic effects of agricultural drainage by incorporating engineered drainage channels into natural river networks, and 3) assess the local and regional hydrologic variability and water resource reliability under re-engineering strategies of agricultural drainage infrastructure.

The successful completion of this project has the potential for transformative impact through the generation of new models and fundamental knowledge of hydrologic dynamics of coupled natural river and engineered drainage networks to enhance the prediction capability for hydrologic processes under human interferences. To advance the educational goals of this CAREER project, the Principal Investigator (PI) proposes to develop and implement project-based education modules for the undergraduate/graduate curricula at Arizona State University to educate the next-generation of engineers about the impacts of increasing human interferences on the hydrologic cycle.

In addition, the PI plans to develop a toolbox for engineered channel delineation and modeling with user-friendly interfaces to encourage adoption by water resources practitioners. The toolbox and other project outcomes will be disseminated through online platforms as well as in-person workshops to engage local collaborators and stakeholders.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.