msu-ceco/aec_v1 · Datasets at Hugging Face

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You can also adjust the irrigation by gallons per acre.
Using this column and the one on the far right, the Cumulative Water Balance column, is how you can determine how much water you need to irrigate your blocks.
Looking at the Cumulative Water Balance Column, a positive number or a "0" indicates the field is saturated.
We generally begin applying irrigation when the field is at 80% water holding capacity, which for clay loam soils often begins at about -20,000 gallons per acre.
The other number you will want to determine is your application rate to know how many hours it will take for your system to put out a given GPA.
To determine this, you will need to know your emitters' flow rate in gallons per hour, and the number of emitters you have per acre.
Multiplying the number of emitters per acre by the flow rate will give you your application rate, which will be in gallons per hour per acre.
So, if you want to apply 5000 GPA, and your application rate is 622 Gallons per hour per acre, you can divide 5000 by 622, and determine you will need to irrigate for eight hours.
There are a few additional recommendations for practicing precision irrigation.
During the early season, apply the necessary irrigation once per week.
Then in mid-June switch to two applications per week in clay or loamy soils, and every other day in sandy soils.
When large rain events are predicted, do not irrigate the day before or three days after the rain event, as the upper layer of soil is likely to still be saturated.
So, if you would like to manage fruit size more precisely and maximize your tree growth in your new plantings, consider trialing the model on some of your irrigated blocks this season.
Nutrient Concentrations in Big Creek Correlate to Regional Watershed Land Use
James Burke Program Associate
Larry Berry Program Associate
Stephen King Principal Scientist, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Arkansas Is Our Campus
In the Ozark Mountain karst region, nutrient concentrations in streams of the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds increase as the percent of land in pasture and urban use increases.
Averaged over the last three years, nutrient concentrations in Big Creek above and below the C&H Farm are similar to concentrations found in other watersheds where there is a similar amount of pasture and urban land use.
Land use within watersheds influences the quantity and quality of water draining from a watershed.
As land disturbance increases and use intensifies, there is a general increase in stormwater runoff and nutrient inputs that leads to a greater potential for nutrient discharge to receiving waters.
For instance, with urban growth, more impervious surfaces increase the flashiness of runoff, stream flows and wastewater treatment discharge.
Also, as areas of agricultural production grow, more fertilizer is applied to achieve optimum production.
Thus, as the percent of a watershed drainage area in pasture, row crop or urban use increases, there is a general increase in nutrient concentrations in storm and base flows.
In this fact sheet, we show the effect of land use on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in streams of the Ozark Highlands and Boston Mountains, northwest Arkansas, by combining previously published data for the Upper Illinois River Watershed , Upper White River Watershed and ongoing
monitoring in the Buffalo River Watershed.
The location of these watersheds is shown in Figure 1.
The relationships between stream nutrient concentrations and land use for the region are used to determine if a permitted concentrated animal feeding operation in Big Creek Watershed, a sub-watershed of the Buffalo River Watershed, has affected stream water quality.
Land use in these watersheds is given in Table 1.
Nitrate-N, total N, dissolved P and total P concentrations have been measured over varying periods during base flow at the outlet of sub-watersheds in the Big Creek , Buffalo , Upper Illinois and Upper White River Watersheds .
Data from Big Creek were paired with discharge available from a gaging station just downstream from the swine CAFO, where the USGS developed the rating curve; discharge information was only available from May 2014 through December 2017.
The data were then used to look at changes in flow-adjusted nutrient concentrations [A] in Big Creek.
[A] Concentration is defined as the mass of a substance , such as a nutrient, over the volume of water in which it is contained, or C = M/V.
"Flow-adjusted nutrient concentrations" when looking at how concentrations change over time in streams, we have to consider how concentrations might also change with stream flow and not just change in mass; nutrient concentrations often have some type of relation to flow, maybe increasing or even decreasing as stream flow increases.
We have to flow-adjust concentrations SO we can remove the variability in concentrations that flow might cause to see how things are changing over time.
Study Watersheds in the Ozark Highlands Ecoregion
Upper Illinois River Watershed
Upper White River Watershed
Figure 1.
Location of the Big Creek, Buffalo River, Upper Illinois River and Upper White River watersheds in the Boston Mountains and Ozark Highlands ecoregion.
Information from U.S.
Geological Survey , Environmental Systems Research Institute and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Table 1.
Percent of forest, pasture and urban land use in the Big Creek, Buffalo River, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds.
Watershed Forest Pasture Urban
Upstream 89.5 8.0 2.6
Downstream 79.5 17.0 3.5
Buffalo River 52 99 0 25 0 1
Upper White River 34 90 7 55 0 44
Upper Illinois River 2 70 27 69 3 61
* Up and downstream of CAFO operation and fields permitted to receive manure.
Putting Stream Nutrient Concentrations Into Context at Big Creek
Geometric mean concentrations!
of stream P and N are related to the percent of watershed drainage area in pasture and urban land use for the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds [C] The dashed lines on Figure 2 represent the upper and lower thresholds concentrations, where there is a 95 percent confidence that a stream draining a watershed with a specific percent pasture and urban land use will have a P and N concentration within those thresholds.
The relationship between land use and stream nutrient concentrations is not a model that can be used to predict concentration.
Given the large variability observed in these relationships, they simply show trends between two variables, land use and stream nutrient concentrations.
Continued monitoring of stream concentrations in Big Creek will continue to more reliably define trends.
As the percent pasture and urban land increases, SO does stream P and N concentrations.
The general increase in nutrient concentrations is consistent with the fact that fertilizer is routinely applied to pastures to maintain forage production, as well as deposition of nutrients by grazing cattle.
Beaver Reservoir Watershed Buffalo River Watershed A Illinois River Watershed
Percent of land in pasture and urban use, %
Figure 2.
Relationship between land use and the geometric mean N and P concentrations in the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds.
Dashed lines represent the 95 percent confidence intervals for the estimated mean.
Green points are geometric mean concentrations measured upstream of the CAFO on Big Creek and red points are geometric mean concentrations measured downstream of the CAFO on Big Creek.
In the Big Creek watershed, the percent of land influenced by human activities doubles from ~10 percent to ~20 percent in the drainage area upstream and downstream of the CAFO.
In Big Creek itself, upstream of the swine production CAFO, the geometric mean concentrations of dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N during base flow were 0.009, 0.030, 0.10 and 0.20 mg L-1, respectively, between September 2013 and December 2017.
Directly downstream of the CAFO, the geometric mean concentrations in Big Creek during base flow over the same period were 0.011, 0.030, 0.25 and 0.37 mg L-1, respectively.
Have Nutrient Concentrations Changed in the Short Term at Big Creek?
Geometric mean nutrient concentrations in Big Creek above and below the swine production CAFO and its current potential sphere of influence from slurry applications are similar to or lower than concentrations measured in rivers draining other subwatersheds in the Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds with similar proportions of agricultural land use.
Long-term water quality data are needed to reliably assess how stream nutrient concentrations have changed in response to watershed management and climate variations.
The literature shows that stream nutrient concentrations can change relatively quickly in response to effluent management , but seeing a response from landscape management can take decades or more.
A myriad of factors may influence observed nutrient concentrations in streams, including discharge, biological processes and climactic conditions , and dominant transport pathways.
Thus, we need to use caution when interpreting trends in water quality over databases that only cover a limited timeframe.
Flow-adjusted concentrations showed no
Time since May 2014, days
Figure 3.
Change in flow-adjusted concentration of dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N over time since May 2014, when monitoring in Big Creek started.
statistically significant increasing or decreasing trends in dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N ; where number of observations is 182) over the current monitoring period.
Nutrient concentrations at Big Creek upstream and downstream of the swine CAFO, and indeed most tributaries of the Buffalo River, are low relative to other watersheds in this ecoregion.
This provides a starting point to build a framework to evaluate changes in nutrient concentrations of streams as a function of land use and management.
The evaluation of flow-adjusted concentrations over time showed that nutrients in Big Creek were not increasing over the short duration of monitoring for which concentration and discharge data were
available.
At this point in time, it is evident that nutrient concentrations in Big Creek have not increased at the monitored site.
However, flow and nutrient concentration data over a longer period are needed to reliably quantify water quality trends and characterize sources, and monitoring needs to continue for at least a decade to evaluate how discharge, season and time influence nutrient fluxes.
Stream nutrient concentration-land use relationships are not a predictive tool.
However, use of these relationships provides a method to determine if nutrient concentrations in a given watershed are similar to observed nutrient concentration-land use gradients in other watersheds of the Ozark Highlands and Boston Mountains.
Over time, tracking these relationships provides a mechanism to note and evaluate changes in nutrient concentrations.
In contrast, soybean maturity is dependent on day length.
Because soybeans may use more or less water than the averages listed in the table, and because it may be difficult to determine the actual correct growth stage, it is important to continue to monitor soil water until maturity.
This is where tools such as an ETgage and soil water sensors come into play.
An ETgage will give you potential crop water use and the soil water sensors will give you an idea of how much water is stored in the soil profile.
Then you will be able to determine how much water the crop will need in either irrigation or precipitation to finish out the year.
Since producers do not have time to do detailed work with large amounts of data often generated using SIS methods, the automation of SIS methods would likely provide incentives to producers by saving their time and, simultaneously, reducing the irrigation applications and producing optimal crop yield.
After cross-referencing the locations of the pivots with their groundwater concentrations, they found that none of the 76 wells feeding into the full-rust pivots contained nitrate above the 10 mg/L threshold established by EPA with the average nitrate concentration being 2.4 mg/L.
The reasons for that, Young said, are threefold.
Groundwater levels for the annual report are collected each spring, so data from some of the 5,000-plus wells measured throughout the state were collected prior to the mid-March floods.
Also, Young said, the floodwaters take time to seep into the states vast groundwater supply.
And in other cases, he said, wells that would typically be examined for the annual report could not be accessed, as they were completely submerged.

You can also adjust the irrigation by gallons per acre.

Using this column and the one on the far right, the Cumulative Water Balance column, is how you can determine how much water you need to irrigate your blocks.

Looking at the Cumulative Water Balance Column, a positive number or a "0" indicates the field is saturated.

We generally begin applying irrigation when the field is at 80% water holding capacity, which for clay loam soils often begins at about -20,000 gallons per acre.

The other number you will want to determine is your application rate to know how many hours it will take for your system to put out a given GPA.

To determine this, you will need to know your emitters' flow rate in gallons per hour, and the number of emitters you have per acre.

Multiplying the number of emitters per acre by the flow rate will give you your application rate, which will be in gallons per hour per acre.

So, if you want to apply 5000 GPA, and your application rate is 622 Gallons per hour per acre, you can divide 5000 by 622, and determine you will need to irrigate for eight hours.

There are a few additional recommendations for practicing precision irrigation.

During the early season, apply the necessary irrigation once per week.

Then in mid-June switch to two applications per week in clay or loamy soils, and every other day in sandy soils.

When large rain events are predicted, do not irrigate the day before or three days after the rain event, as the upper layer of soil is likely to still be saturated.

So, if you would like to manage fruit size more precisely and maximize your tree growth in your new plantings, consider trialing the model on some of your irrigated blocks this season.

Nutrient Concentrations in Big Creek Correlate to Regional Watershed Land Use

James Burke Program Associate

Larry Berry Program Associate

Stephen King Principal Scientist, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Arkansas Is Our Campus

In the Ozark Mountain karst region, nutrient concentrations in streams of the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds increase as the percent of land in pasture and urban use increases.

Averaged over the last three years, nutrient concentrations in Big Creek above and below the C&H Farm are similar to concentrations found in other watersheds where there is a similar amount of pasture and urban land use.

Land use within watersheds influences the quantity and quality of water draining from a watershed.

As land disturbance increases and use intensifies, there is a general increase in stormwater runoff and nutrient inputs that leads to a greater potential for nutrient discharge to receiving waters.

For instance, with urban growth, more impervious surfaces increase the flashiness of runoff, stream flows and wastewater treatment discharge.

Also, as areas of agricultural production grow, more fertilizer is applied to achieve optimum production.

Thus, as the percent of a watershed drainage area in pasture, row crop or urban use increases, there is a general increase in nutrient concentrations in storm and base flows.

In this fact sheet, we show the effect of land use on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in streams of the Ozark Highlands and Boston Mountains, northwest Arkansas, by combining previously published data for the Upper Illinois River Watershed , Upper White River Watershed and ongoing

monitoring in the Buffalo River Watershed.

The location of these watersheds is shown in Figure 1.

The relationships between stream nutrient concentrations and land use for the region are used to determine if a permitted concentrated animal feeding operation in Big Creek Watershed, a sub-watershed of the Buffalo River Watershed, has affected stream water quality.

Land use in these watersheds is given in Table 1.

Nitrate-N, total N, dissolved P and total P concentrations have been measured over varying periods during base flow at the outlet of sub-watersheds in the Big Creek , Buffalo , Upper Illinois and Upper White River Watersheds .

Data from Big Creek were paired with discharge available from a gaging station just downstream from the swine CAFO, where the USGS developed the rating curve; discharge information was only available from May 2014 through December 2017.

The data were then used to look at changes in flow-adjusted nutrient concentrations [A] in Big Creek.

[A] Concentration is defined as the mass of a substance , such as a nutrient, over the volume of water in which it is contained, or C = M/V.

"Flow-adjusted nutrient concentrations" when looking at how concentrations change over time in streams, we have to consider how concentrations might also change with stream flow and not just change in mass; nutrient concentrations often have some type of relation to flow, maybe increasing or even decreasing as stream flow increases.

We have to flow-adjust concentrations SO we can remove the variability in concentrations that flow might cause to see how things are changing over time.

Study Watersheds in the Ozark Highlands Ecoregion

Upper Illinois River Watershed

Upper White River Watershed

Figure 1.

Location of the Big Creek, Buffalo River, Upper Illinois River and Upper White River watersheds in the Boston Mountains and Ozark Highlands ecoregion.

Information from U.S.

Geological Survey , Environmental Systems Research Institute and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Table 1.

Percent of forest, pasture and urban land use in the Big Creek, Buffalo River, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds.

Watershed Forest Pasture Urban

Upstream 89.5 8.0 2.6

Downstream 79.5 17.0 3.5

Buffalo River 52 99 0 25 0 1

Upper White River 34 90 7 55 0 44

Upper Illinois River 2 70 27 69 3 61

* Up and downstream of CAFO operation and fields permitted to receive manure.

Putting Stream Nutrient Concentrations Into Context at Big Creek

Geometric mean concentrations!

of stream P and N are related to the percent of watershed drainage area in pasture and urban land use for the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds [C] The dashed lines on Figure 2 represent the upper and lower thresholds concentrations, where there is a 95 percent confidence that a stream draining a watershed with a specific percent pasture and urban land use will have a P and N concentration within those thresholds.

The relationship between land use and stream nutrient concentrations is not a model that can be used to predict concentration.

Given the large variability observed in these relationships, they simply show trends between two variables, land use and stream nutrient concentrations.

Continued monitoring of stream concentrations in Big Creek will continue to more reliably define trends.

As the percent pasture and urban land increases, SO does stream P and N concentrations.

The general increase in nutrient concentrations is consistent with the fact that fertilizer is routinely applied to pastures to maintain forage production, as well as deposition of nutrients by grazing cattle.

Beaver Reservoir Watershed Buffalo River Watershed A Illinois River Watershed

Percent of land in pasture and urban use, %

Figure 2.

Relationship between land use and the geometric mean N and P concentrations in the Buffalo, Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds.

Dashed lines represent the 95 percent confidence intervals for the estimated mean.

Green points are geometric mean concentrations measured upstream of the CAFO on Big Creek and red points are geometric mean concentrations measured downstream of the CAFO on Big Creek.

In the Big Creek watershed, the percent of land influenced by human activities doubles from ~10 percent to ~20 percent in the drainage area upstream and downstream of the CAFO.

In Big Creek itself, upstream of the swine production CAFO, the geometric mean concentrations of dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N during base flow were 0.009, 0.030, 0.10 and 0.20 mg L-1, respectively, between September 2013 and December 2017.

Directly downstream of the CAFO, the geometric mean concentrations in Big Creek during base flow over the same period were 0.011, 0.030, 0.25 and 0.37 mg L-1, respectively.

Have Nutrient Concentrations Changed in the Short Term at Big Creek?

Geometric mean nutrient concentrations in Big Creek above and below the swine production CAFO and its current potential sphere of influence from slurry applications are similar to or lower than concentrations measured in rivers draining other subwatersheds in the Upper Illinois and Upper White River watersheds with similar proportions of agricultural land use.

Long-term water quality data are needed to reliably assess how stream nutrient concentrations have changed in response to watershed management and climate variations.

The literature shows that stream nutrient concentrations can change relatively quickly in response to effluent management , but seeing a response from landscape management can take decades or more.

A myriad of factors may influence observed nutrient concentrations in streams, including discharge, biological processes and climactic conditions , and dominant transport pathways.

Thus, we need to use caution when interpreting trends in water quality over databases that only cover a limited timeframe.

Flow-adjusted concentrations showed no

Time since May 2014, days

Figure 3.

Change in flow-adjusted concentration of dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N over time since May 2014, when monitoring in Big Creek started.

statistically significant increasing or decreasing trends in dissolved P, total P, nitrate-N and total N ; where number of observations is 182) over the current monitoring period.

Nutrient concentrations at Big Creek upstream and downstream of the swine CAFO, and indeed most tributaries of the Buffalo River, are low relative to other watersheds in this ecoregion.

This provides a starting point to build a framework to evaluate changes in nutrient concentrations of streams as a function of land use and management.

The evaluation of flow-adjusted concentrations over time showed that nutrients in Big Creek were not increasing over the short duration of monitoring for which concentration and discharge data were

available.

At this point in time, it is evident that nutrient concentrations in Big Creek have not increased at the monitored site.

However, flow and nutrient concentration data over a longer period are needed to reliably quantify water quality trends and characterize sources, and monitoring needs to continue for at least a decade to evaluate how discharge, season and time influence nutrient fluxes.

Stream nutrient concentration-land use relationships are not a predictive tool.

However, use of these relationships provides a method to determine if nutrient concentrations in a given watershed are similar to observed nutrient concentration-land use gradients in other watersheds of the Ozark Highlands and Boston Mountains.

Over time, tracking these relationships provides a mechanism to note and evaluate changes in nutrient concentrations.

In contrast, soybean maturity is dependent on day length.

Because soybeans may use more or less water than the averages listed in the table, and because it may be difficult to determine the actual correct growth stage, it is important to continue to monitor soil water until maturity.

This is where tools such as an ETgage and soil water sensors come into play.

An ETgage will give you potential crop water use and the soil water sensors will give you an idea of how much water is stored in the soil profile.

Then you will be able to determine how much water the crop will need in either irrigation or precipitation to finish out the year.

Since producers do not have time to do detailed work with large amounts of data often generated using SIS methods, the automation of SIS methods would likely provide incentives to producers by saving their time and, simultaneously, reducing the irrigation applications and producing optimal crop yield.

After cross-referencing the locations of the pivots with their groundwater concentrations, they found that none of the 76 wells feeding into the full-rust pivots contained nitrate above the 10 mg/L threshold established by EPA with the average nitrate concentration being 2.4 mg/L.

The reasons for that, Young said, are threefold.

Groundwater levels for the annual report are collected each spring, so data from some of the 5,000-plus wells measured throughout the state were collected prior to the mid-March floods.

Also, Young said, the floodwaters take time to seep into the states vast groundwater supply.

And in other cases, he said, wells that would typically be examined for the annual report could not be accessed, as they were completely submerged.