Estimation of recharge and nutrient leaching at different scales to improve sustainable land and groundwater management

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Ten million Canadians rely on groundwater as a drinking water source. This resource is under continuous threat of contamination. This is a growing problem; a study on environmental sustainability of Canadian agriculture reported a decline in water quality throughout Canada due to increased application of fertilizers (Eilers et al., 2010). As a result, Frost reported in 2006 that approximately 16% of Manitoban water supply wells had nitrate levels above the drinking water guidelines (10 mg/L NO3-N). Leaching of pollutants is controlled by fluxes in the unsaturated zone. Seasonal climatic variability produces extreme changes in both the spatial and temporal distribution of recharge. A recurring event-based recharge in the Canadian Prairies emerges during snowmelt in combination with soil thawing, which is characterized by fast water fluxes. Fast fluxes imply a high risk of contamination. This is in contrast to the average hydrologic conditions currently being used to identify the risk. Groundwater models are a valuable tool for the quantification, evaluation, and prediction of the risk. Present models that include the climatic variability cannot accurately predict the risk of groundwater contamination for sustainable land and groundwater management since they require vast amounts of temporal and spatial input data to predict future states reliably. The proposed work will pursue innovative research on sustainable land and groundwater management by consideration of the temporal and spatial variability of soil properties and the changing climate. The research will be evaluated in three sections, (i) recharge as the driving force of pollutant movement, (ii) pollutants leaching into the groundwater, and (iii) impact of recharge and leaching on groundwater quality.****We have previously shown that physically-based recharge modeling using data from low-cost observations has vast potential to predict recharge at the point scale. This work will be extended by focusing on fast fluxes in the unsaturated zone during soil thawing and snow melt situations and by using advanced geostatistical methods for spatial upscaling. Downscaled climate data will be used to identify recharge under changing climate situations. In the second part of the initial 5-year cycle, a robust measurement technique to estimate nitrate leaching rates with a focus on thawing will be established and applied in the field and in the laboratory. The observed pattern and kinetics of nitrate leaching will be used for numerical modeling. Recharge and leaching estimates will be integrated into groundwater modeling using split-operator techniques to identify the state of groundwater and future risk of nitrate contamination.*Thus, sophisticated sustainable land and groundwater management policies can be developed based on the knowledge of the temporal and spatial variability of soil and hydrological parameters.***