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"Ogallala Aquifer."
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Running out : in search of water on the High Plains
\"This book--the first ethnography of water conservation on the Great Plains--provides an account of High Plains aquifer decline through an exploration of the different ways in which heartland residents inhabit and understand the imminent depletion of groundwater. This literary ethnography offers a vividly sketched look into the lives and stories of this community, based on interviews with members of the community such as fellow farmers and state regulators, woven together with historical data, journalistic documentation, and Bessire's personal reflections of his family's lived experiences. (Five generations of the author's family have lived in the region as farmers and ranchers.)\"-- Provided by publisher [copied from hardcover record]
Book
Tapping unsustainable groundwater stores for agricultural production in the High Plains Aquifer of Kansas, projections to 2110
Groundwater provides a reliable tap to sustain agricultural production, yet persistent aquifer depletion threatens future sustainability. The High Plains Aquifer supplies 30% of the nation’s irrigated groundwater, and the Kansas portion supports the congressional district with the highest market value for agriculture in the nation. We project groundwater declines to assess when the study area might run out of water, and comprehensively forecast the impacts of reduced pumping on corn and cattle production. So far, 30% of the groundwater has been pumped and another 39% will be depleted over the next 50 y given existing trends. Recharge supplies 15% of current pumping and would take an average of 500–1,300 y to completely refill a depleted aquifer. Significant declines in the region’s pumping rates will occur over the next 15–20 y given current trends, yet irrigated agricultural production might increase through 2040 because of projected increases in water use efficiencies in corn production. Water use reductions of 20% today would cut agricultural production to the levels of 15–20 y ago, the time of peak agricultural production would extend to the 2070s, and production beyond 2070 would significantly exceed that projected without reduced pumping. Scenarios evaluate incremental reductions of current pumping by 20–80%, the latter rate approaching natural recharge. Findings substantiate that saving more water today would result in increased net production due to projected future increases in crop water use efficiencies. Society has an opportunity now to make changes with tremendous implications for future sustainability and livability.
Journal Article
Quantifying irrigation adaptation strategies in response to stakeholder-driven groundwater management in the US High Plains Aquifer
Irrigation enhances agricultural yields and stabilizes farmer incomes, but overexploitation has depleted groundwater resources around the globe. Strategies to address this sustainability challenge differ widely. Socio-ecological systems research suggests that management of common pool resources like groundwater would benefit from localized approaches that combine self-organization along with active monitoring. In 2012, the US state of Kansas established a Local Enhanced Management Area (LEMA) program, empowering farmers to work with local and state officials to develop five-year, enforceable groundwater conservation programs. Here, we assessed the efficacy of the first LEMA implemented from 2013 to 2017 using a causal impact methodology based on Bayesian structural time series that is new to agrohydrology. Compared to control scenarios, we found that the LEMA reduced water use by 31% over the five-year period, with early indications of stabilizing groundwater levels. Three main conservation strategies can lead to reduced water use: (1) reducing irrigated area, (2) reducing irrigation amount applied to existing crops through improved efficiency, and/or (3) switching to crops that require less water. To partition water savings among these strategies, we combined satellite-derived irrigated areas and crop type maps with well records. We found that farmers were able to largely maintain irrigated area and achieved the majority of pumping reductions (72%) from improvements in irrigation efficiency, followed by expansion of crops with lower water demand (19%). The results of this analysis demonstrate that conservation programs that are irrigator-driven with regulatory oversight can provide a path toward sustainability in stressed aquifers.
Journal Article
A roadblock on the path to aquifer sustainability: underestimating the impact of pumping reductions
Depletion of aquifers across the globe is challenging our ability to maintain critically needed agricultural production and provide potable water supplies for millions. In most cases, the only option to decrease the rate of depletion is to reduce the pumping of groundwater. Although implementation of large-scale pumping reductions in the absence of alternative water sources has proven difficult, recent work has shown that locally based, stakeholder-driven initiatives, coupled with regulatory oversight, can be a promising path forward. A critical question is how much must pumping be reduced to have a significant impact on decline rates. Data limitations and modeling uncertainties, however, have frustrated efforts to answer this question with reliable estimates of the needed reductions. We address this situation using a variant of the water-balance equation to identify a key factor, the misestimation of specific yield, that is limiting our ability to assess the impact of proposed pumping reductions. We find that common modeling practices can lead to large overestimates of the required pumping reductions, thereby inadvertently discouraging conservation efforts. We demonstrate the importance of this general finding using data from the High Plains Aquifer in the central United States where common practices have led to overestimates of required pumping reductions by a factor of three to six. We introduce a new metric, the coefficient of variation of net inflow, to help identify such conditions. The reliability of estimates of the impact of pumping reductions can be greatly improved when the constraints imposed by this new metric are combined with a recently proposed method for estimation of specific yield from field data. The ramifications of these findings are far reaching, as defensible estimates of the impact of proposed pumping reductions are an essential element of efforts to chart more sustainable paths for the world's heavily stressed aquifers.
Journal Article
Ogallala
2019 emChoice/em Outstanding Academic Title The Ogallala aquifer, a vast underground water reserve extending from South Dakota through Texas, is the product of eons of accumulated glacial melts, ancient Rocky Mountain snowmelts, and rainfall, all percolating slowly through gravel beds hundreds of feet thick. emOgallala: Water for a Dry Land/em is an environmental history and historical geography that tells the story of human defiance and human commitment within the Ogallala region. It describes the Great Plains' natural resources, the history of settlement and dryland farming, and the remarkable irrigation technologies that have industrialized farming in the region. This newly updated third edition discusses three main issues: long-term drought and its implications, the efforts of several key groundwater management districts to regulate the aquifer, and T. Boone Pickens's failed effort to capture water from the aquifer to supply major Texas urban areas. This edition also describes the fierce independence of Texas ranchers and farmers who reject any governmental or bureaucratic intervention in their use of water, and it updates information about the impact of climate change on the aquifer and agriculture. Read Char Miller's article on theconversation.com to learn more about the Ogallala Aquifer.
eBook
Peak grain forecasts for the US High Plains amid withering waters
Irrigated agriculture contributes 40% of total global food production. In the US High Plains, which produces more than 50 million tons per year of grain, as much as 90% of irrigation originates from groundwater resources, including the Ogallala aquifer. In parts of the High Plains, groundwater resources are being depleted so rapidly that they are considered nonrenewable, compromising food security. When groundwater becomes scarce, groundwater withdrawals peak, causing a subsequent peak in crop production. Previous descriptions of finite natural resource depletion have utilized the Hubbert curve. By coupling the dynamics of groundwater pumping, recharge, and crop production, Hubbert-like curves emerge, responding to the linked variations in groundwater pumping and grain production. On a state level, this approach predicted when groundwater withdrawal and grain production peaked and the lag between them. The lags increased with the adoption of efficient irrigation practices and higher recharge rates. Results indicate that, in Texas, withdrawals peaked in 1966, followed by a peak in grain production 9 y later. After better irrigation technologies were adopted, the lag increased to 15 y from 1997 to 2012. In Kansas, where these technologies were employed concurrently with the rise of irrigated grain production, this lag was predicted to be 24 y starting in 1994. In Nebraska, grain production is projected to continue rising through 2050 because of high recharge rates. While Texas and Nebraska had equal irrigated output in 1975, by 2050, it is projected that Nebraska will have almost 10 times the groundwater-based production of Texas.
Journal Article
High Plains Aquifer–State of Affairs of Irrigated Agriculture and Role of Irrigation in the Sustainability Paradigm
Groundwater depletion is a serious issue in the southern and central parts of the High Plains Aquifer (HPA), USA. A considerable imbalance exists between the recharge process and groundwater extractions in these areas, which threatens the long-term sustainability of the aquifer. Irrigated agriculture has a major share in the economy, and it requires high pumping rates in regions vulnerable to large groundwater level declines. A literature review has been conducted to understand the state of affairs of irrigated agriculture in the HPA, along with the dynamics of groundwater decline and recharge using statistical and remote-sensing based datasets. Also, three irrigation management and technology-based approaches have been discussed from the perspective of sustainability. The southern and central parts of the HPA consist mostly of non-renewable groundwater formations, and the natural water storage is prone to exhaustion. Moreover, the aforementioned regions have comparatively higher crop water requirement due to the climate, and irrigating crops in these regions puts stringent pressure on the aquifer. The upper threshold of irrigation application efficiency (IAE) is high in the HPA, and could reach up to 95%; however, considerable room for improvement in irrigation water management exists. In general, the practices of irrigation scheduling used in the HPA are conventional and a small proportion of growers use modern methods to decide about irrigation timing. Among numerous ways to promote sustainable groundwater use in the HPA, deficit irrigation, use of soil moisture sensors, and subsurface drip irrigation can be considered as potential ways to attain higher lifespans in susceptible parts of the aquifer.
Journal Article
Influence of deficit irrigation and biochar amendment on growth, physiology, and yield of cucumber in West Texas
Despite growing interest in adopting water-conserving strategies such as deficit irrigation (DI) and biochar amendment in arid and semi-arid regions, there are remarkably few studies conducted on the integration of these two strategies in water limited West Texas region. The aim of this study was to assess the interactive effects of DI and biochar amendment on saturated hydraulic conductivity of soil and the growth, physiology and yield of cucumber (
Cucumis sativus
) in West Texas. A split-plot design was used to randomize four irrigation treatments (with two levels before and after mid-season) as the main plot [I1: 100% crop evapotranspiration (ETc)-100% ETc, I2: 80% ETc-60% ETc, I3: 60% ETc-80% ETc, I4: 40% ETc-40% ETc] and three biochar rates as subplot [0 t/ha, 15 t/ha, and 20 t/ha] with four replications. Irrigation level I4 negatively impacted chlorophyll content, stomatal conductance, transpiration, photosynthesis, and intrinsic water use efficiency (iWUE) when the weather was hot and dry in 2022 compared to other treatments. Leaf area index (LAI) under I4 declined significantly by 52% and the final dry biomass by 47% compared to I1 across two years, although I3 reduced biomass by 17% only in 2022. As compared to I1, the yield penalties due to water stress in I2, I3, and I4 were 14, 16, and 34%, respectively, across two years. Although biochar rates 15 t/ha and 20 t/ha significantly increased the saturated hydraulic conductivity of soil by 1.6 and 2.2 folds in 2022 compared to the unamended control but biochar’s impact on cucumber growth, physiology, and yield was minimum during both years. Hence, our findings suggest that I2 can be adopted as an alternative to full irrigation which requires 25% less water and has 14% narrow yield gap. Biochar studies are needed to assess whether added biochar has an apparent long-term effect on improving cucumber yield.
Journal Article
Hydrogeochemical Evaluation of Groundwater Quality Parameters for Ogallala Aquifer in the Southern High Plains Region, USA
The purposes of this study are to analyze the groundwater quality of the Ogallala Aquifer and evaluate the hydrological characteristics in the southern High Plains region of the Permian Basin, Texas. Levels of chloride, fluoride, nitrate, selenium, pH, and total dissolved solids (TDS) were analyzed for the period 1990–2016. Data concerning a total of 133 wells were collected from the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), which is an open database provided by the US government. The average levels of contaminants were compared to their respective Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCL) stipulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study area experienced high concentrations of most parameters including chloride, fluoride, nitrate, selenium, and TDS, within the contaminants’ respective MCLs. Borden and Dawson counties experienced the highest overall amounts of groundwater pollutants. Possible sources of each contaminant are discussed, with oil and gas activities, agricultural practices, and other human actions impacting the conditions. This research provides important information about groundwater quality of the Ogallala Aquifer and contributes to understanding the response to development in the Permian Basin, Texas.
Journal Article
Fostering Resilience and Adaptation to Drought in the Southern High Plains: Using Participatory Methods for More Robust Citizen Science
Citizen science holds the potential and capacity to change the role of science in the face of current and impending environmental sustainability challenges. However, the sustainability science community must also address the ethical challenges inherent in the nature and outcomes of citizen participation and inclusion. In this article, we provide a brief history of Participatory Action Research (PAR), long popular in the social sciences, and explain how participatory methods can inform the process and products of citizen science to meet the dueling ideals of ethically engaging communities and producing more robust science. Our decade of human-environment research on drought resilience and adaptation in the Southern High Plains of the United States illustrates how PAR complements formal science and can contribute to community resilience and adaptation efforts. Synthesized into 10 entry points for more ethical and participatory science, our semi-chronological narrative offers concrete strategies informed by PAR principles and values, at various stages of research, and highlights the place-based, ethical, and methodological contexts for applying each strategy.
Journal Article