| Adam Schreiner-McGraw |
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Dr. Schreiner-McGraw is a Research Hydrologist for the USDA-ARS in Columbia, Missouri. He is interested in understanding how cropping practices influence water resources in the U.S. Corn Belt, as well as understanding the role of groundwater in controlling crop yield and carbon cycles.
As a research hydrologist with the USDA-ARS, his primary work is related to the Central Mississippi River Basin LTAR site (The Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network (usda.gov). He will work to evaluate the behavior of crop water use (evaporation) and growth across the business-as-usual, aspirational, and native prairie sites. His long-term projects seek to evaluate the resilience of these agro-ecosystems to drought and extreme wet periods.
More information can be found at: www.adamschreinermcgraw.com
My research
As a research hydrologist, I am primarily concerned with water movement (runoff and evaporation) and storage (soil and groundwater). More specifically, I am an ‘ecohydrologist’, meaning I study how (agro)-ecosystems interact with water resources. With the USDA in Columbia, this means my primary research questions are:
- Quantify within-field spatial variability in evapotranspiration and relate this to soil properties, especially the depth to the claypan restrictive layer.
- Relating groundwater, soil moisture, and plant water use to crop yield in different cropping systems.
- Quantify the resilience of different agro-ecosystems to changes in environmental conditions with a focus on variability in precipitation (i.e., drought).
- Understanding the hydrologic consequences of human actions including land use transitions (for example, changes in cropping systems or acreage under cultivation) and climate change in the Midwest.
Why I’m doing this research
The U.S. Corn Belt is one of the most intensively managed landscapes in the world and is crucial for supplying food for a growing population. Farm management decisions can have wide ranging consequences affecting crop yield, water quality, and flooding. I aim to evaluate management practices to maximize crop yield under changing environmental conditions, while considering the other societal impacts these practices have.
How my research is conducted
I collect data from environmental sensor networks located in long-term research fields. The primary technique that I use is called ‘eddy covariance’ and it measures evaporation as well as carbon uptake or release from fields. I use this data to test research hypotheses. Also, I use this data to improve the way plants are represented in state-of-the-art hydrologic models. Once I build these models, I can use them to test the impact of farming management at large scales.
Notable findings
- Inspection of carbon uptake shows that our aspirational management that includes cover crops, no-till, and variable rate nitrogen application is more resilient to sub-optimal weather conditions than the business-as-usual field.
- Interannual variability in carbon uptake is dampened by agricultural management practices, relative to a native prairie.
- Measurement of plant water use as well as the total field evaporation provides data that allows improved simulations by a hydrologic model.
