Watershed Management

Watershed management is a broad theme that examines relations between land use practices and the status of ecosystem attributes or overall resource health. Different watersheds have different types of land uses and human activities, each having varying degrees of intensity and magnitude. Understanding how these land use practices and activities impact watershed conditions and interact with surrounding ecosystems is important for sound environmental and economic decision making. Watershed management can be divided into a few broad categories including nutrient management, aquatic health, and land use land cover change.

Watershed Nutrient Management

At AGS, we specialize in watershed nutrient management using multiple, complementing approaches. In agro-ecosystems, nutrient management and biogeochemical modeling is challenging due to vast differences in agricultural systems and ecological drivers and the costs and time in constructing traditional assessments. Our comprehensive approach highlights the link between basic ecological drivers, carbon and nitrogen biogeochemical cycling, trace gas emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural sustainability. Our cutting-edge geo-spatial technology can be applied at the farm, state and national scales.

Nutrient management. We conduct remote sensing of land use land cover and agricultural practices and develop GIS databases indicating the spatial and temporal variations of primary ecological drivers (i.e., climate/weather, topography, soils, vegetation, tillage practices, and human activities). Utilizing the extensive geospatial datasets we apply advanced modeling approaches to evaluate impacts of the ecological drivers on environmental factors (e.g., radiation, temperature, soil moisture, Eh, pH, concentrations of nutrients or substrates, etc.) to derive output that is parameterized to the watershed and activities. We finally execute biogeochemical modeling of the impacts of the environmental factors on the biochemical or geochemical reactions, which determines the partitioning of carbon and nitrogen species. Our biogeochemical modeling capabilities allow us to determine the major sinks and sources of carbon and nitrogen in agro-ecosystems. By manipulating the model parameters we evaluate management scenarios to assess nutrient cycles and trace gas emissions in varying agro-ecosystems under different managements.

Linked with these efforts are agricultural and forestry under various climate change scenarios.