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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Environmental Microbial & Food Safety Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #317063
Title: Modeling the fate and transport of bacteria in agricultural and pasture lands using APEX

Author
item PARK, YONGEUN - ORISE FELLOW
item Pachepsky, Yakov
item JEONG, JAEHAK - TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
item SHELTON, DANIEL
item WHELAN, GENE - ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (EPA)

Submitted to: BARC Poster Day
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/7/2015
Publication Date: 5/20/2015
Citation: Park, Y., Pachepsky, Y.A., Jeong, J., Shelton, D.R., Whelan, G. 2015. Modeling the fate and transport of bacteria in agricultural and pasture lands using APEX. BARC Poster Day. 26th Annual Beltsville Poster Day, National Agriculture Library, May 20, 2015. P. 82.

Interpretive Summary: .

Technical Abstract: The Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender (APEX) model is a whole farm to small watershed scale continuous simulation model developed for evaluating various land management strategies. The current version, APEX0806, does not have the modeling capacity for fecal indicator bacteria fate and transport (FIBF&T), which limits the usability of APEX in many environmental assessments. This study aims to build bacteria F&T subroutines in APEX in agricultural fields and pastures. APEX provides essential inputs for the bacteria F&T subroutines including manure and animal waste loads, manure and animal waste erosion rates, incorporation scheduling, runoff and infiltration rates, sediment transport, retention in vegetated buffer strips, and soil and air temperature time series. Specific bacteria F&T processes include aboveground survival, survival in soil, distribution between suspended and sediment-associated in runoff bacteria fractions, rainfall-induced release after animal waste deposition, mobilization from soil to runoff, and distribution between runoff and infiltration. Process for this study consisted of three steps: 1) development of independent test driver for testing bacteria F&T phenomena based on model equation and model parameterization in each system, 2) combination of test driver and APEX main module to practically evaluate the model performance in APEX model and 3) application of field data to developed model. The Arrhenius type Q10 model was applied to simulate the bacteria survival dependence on temperature. Simulation results of the FiBF&T subroutine in APEX indicated reasonable prediction of FIB fate and transport when compared with the data of three years (2011-2013) experiments with Escherichia coli release from irrigated manured fields in Beltsville MD. As a future study, model parameter sensitivity analysis and uncertainty analysis will be applied to the developed FIBF&T model to check model reliability.