Location: Sustainable Water Management Research
Project Number: 6066-13000-006-032-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2024
End Date: Jul 31, 2026
Objective:
This project will have multiple objectives to develop decision support tools to aid producers across the Mississippi Delta in developing Climate-Resillient water management strategies and create tools to aid researchers in understanding the relationship between climate and water management. In Objective 1, evapotranspiration (ET) towers will be installed on selected sites. Objective 2, will develop, calibrate, and validate models of ET data from developed from the towers as well as other remote sensing techniques such as eddy covariance towers and other observed data across selected sites. Objective 3 will used the calibrated models from Objective 2 to model different water management strategies. Objective 4 will be to build a Decision Support Tool (DST) interface to allow producers and researchers to make informed decisions for water management and responding to climate change.
Approach:
To accomplish the objectives of this project the Cooperator and ARS will work together through a series of subtasks for each objectives. In the first subtask (1.1) An evapotranspiration (ET) tower will be installed to provide reference ET data. In subtask 1.2, a method to collect, clean, and curate the data from the reference ET tower will be developed. In task 2 field data on Mississippi farms' crop growth, evapotranspiration (ET) rates, groundwater levels, and other water and agronomic data will be collected from both commercial and research fields. ARS will identify the fields while the Cooperator will collect the data for model development. After collecting data the Cooperator will use the data to develop (subtask 2.2), calibrate (subtask 2.3) and validate (subtask 2.4) models of water use. Objective 3 will be carried out by modeling water use under various Climate-Resillent water management strategies (subtask 3.1). Subtask 3.2 will evaluate the model efficiences against future climate change scenarios. ARS and the Cooperator will work together to define different water management scenarios within the framework. These scenarios may include: varying irrigation practices (e.g., timing, amount of water applied, and/or method of water application), crop rotations, planting densities, and variety selection. The Cooperator will use the integrated framework to run simulations for each management strategy (subtask 3.3). Objective 4 will be to build a Decision Support Tool (DST) interface to allow producers and researchers to make informed decisions for water management and responding to climate change. The Cooperator will design a user-friendly interface that allows for the easy input of farm data and selection of management scenarios (subtask 4.1). Once the DST interface is designed the Cooperator will develop functionalities for visualizing model output, such as graphs and maps, to facilitate interpretation of results (subtask 4.2).
