Understanding the relationship between agricultural nutrients NPS, land management, and climate using distributed hydrologic models
type: CreativeWork
description: The use of chemical fertilizer has enhanced agricultural production that helped provide food to seven billion people worldwide. Particularly, the use of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilizers, which increased more than nine and four times, respectively, during the last five decades, played significant roles in improving soil fertility, crop health, and yield performance. However, the massive use of N and P fertilizer has led to severe environmental issues such as harmful algal bloom (HAB), a decline in biodiversity, and contaminated drinking water which can lead to serious threats to public health and critical stress to the agroecosystem because of the high fertilizer loss. To mitigate the excessive nutrient loading in our water bodies, different land management schemes have been developed and implemented to reduce N and P NPS in the agroecosystem, but the effectiveness of these land management practices needs evaluation. Due to the complexity of the watershed response to natural and anthropogenic stressors like changing climate and changes in land management scenarios, a modeling framework that allows the conceptualization of physically-based hydrologic and transport processes should be adopted to provide reliable predictions and a better understanding of the systemic responses. This study was geared at understanding how agricultural nutrients NPS were impacted by natural and anthropogenic changes such as climate and land management practices, respectively. Modeling frameworks with field-level spatial resolution were developed to evaluate the effectiveness of NPS reduction practices when detailed and field-level specific land management practices were implemented under extreme climate projections. First, the impacts of different land management practices and climate on surface runoff linked N load at the field-level scale were evaluated. Second, different types of N NPS patterns in the Upper Sangamon River Basin (USRB), a highly cultivated watershed, under wet…
abstract: The use of chemical fertilizer has enhanced agricultural production that helped provide food to seven billion people worldwide. Particularly, the use of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilizers, which increased more than nine and four times, respectively, during the last five decades, played significant roles in improving soil fertility, crop health, and yield performance. However, the massive use of N and P fertilizer has led to severe environmental issues such as harmful algal bloom (HAB), a decline in biodiversity, and contaminated drinking water which can lead to serious threats to public health and critical stress to the agroecosystem because of the high fertilizer loss. To mitigate the excessive nutrient loading in our water bodies, different land management schemes have been developed and implemented to reduce N and P NPS in the agroecosystem, but the effectiveness of these land management practices needs evaluation. Due to the complexity of the watershed response to natural and anthropogenic stressors like changing climate and changes in land management scenarios, a modeling framework that allows the conceptualization of physically-based hydrologic and transport processes should be adopted to provide reliable predictions and a better understanding of the systemic responses. This study was geared at understanding how agricultural nutrients NPS were impacted by natural and anthropogenic changes such as climate and land management practices, respectively. Modeling frameworks with field-level spatial resolution were developed to evaluate the effectiveness of NPS reduction practices when detailed and field-level specific land management practices were implemented under extreme climate projections. First, the impacts of different land management practices and climate on surface runoff linked N load at the field-level scale were evaluated. Second, different types of N NPS patterns in the Upper Sangamon River Basin (USRB), a highly cultivated watershed, under wet…
author: Hou, Congyu
language: en
keywords: Agricultural nutrients, NPS, land management practices, modelling
date published: 2021-09-17T01:11:15Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:52Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/110556