High-resolution water quality data helps researchers find opportunities to reduce runoff from farm fields and protect the Chesapeake Bay.
How do you keep fertilizer and manure in farm fields in a rainstorm? You start by knowing how nutrients flow through the environment. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are washed through a landscape during rains, which is both expensive to farmers who need the nutrients to grow crops, and potentially harmful to downstream waterways. So, farmers employ a range of tactics to keep nutrients in the soil where crop roots can use them.
But in order to know what works, they need to know when and where the nutrients wash off their fields. Measuring nutrients downstream of farms is one way to understand what flows off the land, but not all nitrogen and phosphorus are the same. Some come from fertilizers farmers apply, but some come from natural processes in the land, and some even come from wooded regions or development upstream from farms.
Dr. Gurpal Toor, a professor and extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology, is tracing the different types of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into drainage ditches, tile drains, and overland flow at the edges of farm fields during rainfall events.
University of Maryland Scientists Dr. Gurpal Toor and Dr. Yun-Ya Yang looks to find the optimal practices that to keep nutrients in crop root zones and out of local waterways. This helps to reduce the cost of farming while simultaneously keeping the Chesapeake Bay's waters cleaner. This project was funded by the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology.
