SEES Fellows: Leveraging the waterscape to increase agricultural landscape sustainability

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. The Midwestern United States is often referred to as the Corn Belt for its importance as a center of agriculture. Unfortunately, agricultural productivity has come at the expense of the water quality and biological integrity of surrounding and downstream waterscapes within the Minnesota River Basin and the Northern Gulf of Mexico. This project will assess the ecological and economic implications of modifying wetland and backwater hydrologic connectivity to enhance nitrate retention during critical nitrogen loading storm events and seasons. This project will develop a conceptual end-to-end framework to define functionality and variability of key hydro-biogeochemical processes controlling wetland nitrogen retention at multiple scales and to evaluate the economic-environmental trade-offs that define policy implementation feasibility. This research will contribute to scientific understanding of how hydro-biogeochemical processes at sub-watershed scales influence whole watershed export of an important aquatic contaminant, i.e. nitrate, by investigating the processes and scale specific controls in an intensively agricultural watershed. Defining sustainable agricultural practices and controlling diffuse pollutant loading with external environmental degradation are issues of local, national and global importance. By providing a sound scientific basis and an economic-environmental tradeoff assessment model, the proposed research could advance wetland policy implementation by addressing key knowledge gaps. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Amy Hansen, will work with host mentor Dr. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou at the University of Minnesota, and with partner mentor Dr. Catherine Kling at Iowa State University.