ENST's Dr. Masoud Negahban-Azar and colleagues receive $750K from USDA to study and reduce barriers to future groundwater resource management.
Image Credit: USDA NRCS Montana
With major water shortages plaguing the Western States, it can be easy to overlook what’s happening right here under our own feet. Historically, water shortages have not been a concern for Mid-Atlantic farmers who typically don’t need to irrigate their fields or implement water conservation methods like carefully scheduled irrigation and waste water reuse. But such measures are likely to be necessary in the future as climate change shifts rainfall patterns in ways that demand more irrigation even as groundwater levels drop dramatically.
No one knows how receptive farmers, policymakers and communities will be to such practices, or what factors will influence their decisions, and how these decisions will impact the water resources in the region. But Masoud Negahban-Azar and his colleagues intend to find out.
Negahban-Azar is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. He and his colleagues received $749,890 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to study the socio-economic factors surrounding adoption of alternative water sources and water conservation best management practices in the Coastal Plain.
