SEES Fellows: Leveraging the waterscape to increase agricultural landscape sustainability

该项目由NSF科学、工程和教育促进可持续发展研究员(SEE FERLOS)计划支持，目标是帮助实现必要的发现，为导致环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。可持续发展科学是一个新兴领域，它解决了在不损害环境、不牺牲子孙后代满足其需求的能力的情况下满足人类需求的挑战。一支强大的科学队伍需要接受跨学科研究和思维方面的教育和培训，特别是在可持续发展科学领域。在SEES奖学金的支持下，该项目将使一位有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续发展相关的独立研究生涯中确立自己的地位。美国中西部经常被称为玉米带，因为它作为农业中心的重要性。不幸的是，农业生产力的代价是明尼苏达河流域和墨西哥湾北部周围和下游水域的水质和生物完整性。该项目将评估在关键的氮素负荷风暴事件和季节期间，改变湿地和回水水文连通性以提高硝酸盐留存的生态和经济影响。该项目将制定一个端到端的概念性框架，以确定在多个尺度上控制湿地氮保持的关键水文生物地球化学过程的功能和可变性，并评估确定政策执行可行性的经济-环境权衡。这项研究将通过调查集约化农业流域的过程和尺度具体控制，有助于科学理解子流域尺度上的水文生物地球化学过程如何影响一种重要的水污染物--硝酸盐的整个流域输出。确定可持续的农业做法和控制扩散污染物负荷与外部环境退化是地方、国家和全球的重要问题。通过提供可靠的科学基础和经济-环境权衡评估模型，拟议的研究可以通过解决关键知识差距来促进湿地政策的实施。See研究员艾米·汉森博士将与明尼苏达大学的东道主导师Efi Fufoula-Georgiou博士以及爱荷华州立大学的合作伙伴导师Catherine Kling博士合作。

The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. The Midwestern United States is often referred to as the Corn Belt for its importance as a center of agriculture. Unfortunately, agricultural productivity has come at the expense of the water quality and biological integrity of surrounding and downstream waterscapes within the Minnesota River Basin and the Northern Gulf of Mexico. This project will assess the ecological and economic implications of modifying wetland and backwater hydrologic connectivity to enhance nitrate retention during critical nitrogen loading storm events and seasons. This project will develop a conceptual end-to-end framework to define functionality and variability of key hydro-biogeochemical processes controlling wetland nitrogen retention at multiple scales and to evaluate the economic-environmental trade-offs that define policy implementation feasibility. This research will contribute to scientific understanding of how hydro-biogeochemical processes at sub-watershed scales influence whole watershed export of an important aquatic contaminant, i.e. nitrate, by investigating the processes and scale specific controls in an intensively agricultural watershed. Defining sustainable agricultural practices and controlling diffuse pollutant loading with external environmental degradation are issues of local, national and global importance. By providing a sound scientific basis and an economic-environmental tradeoff assessment model, the proposed research could advance wetland policy implementation by addressing key knowledge gaps. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Amy Hansen, will work with host mentor Dr. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou at the University of Minnesota, and with partner mentor Dr. Catherine Kling at Iowa State University.