Hydric Soils of the Prairie Pothole Region: Optimizing ecosystem services in complex agroecosystems

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Food security and water security are two of the great challenges facing our growing global population. However, to successfully address these challenges, we need to carefully balance what can sometimes be viewed as competing needs: maximizing the productive land base while minimizing potential negative impacts on water quality and quantity and maximizing the other ecosystem services in the agricultural landscape. These include those services like carbon storage, water filtration, and nutrient cycling provided by the hydric soils associated with small wetlands and intermittent streams. The proposed program will provide essential information and necessary tools to tackle this balancing act for the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), which spans over 750,000 km2, including the majority of Canadian Prairie farmland. The program consists of three complementary projects that fill gaps in our current understanding of hydric soils and their role in agro-ecosystems: 1) Developing a digital soil mapping (DSM) toolkit that we can use to improve our mapping of the location of wetlands and streams and their associated soil types, 2) Determining which wetland and riparian soil processes are most/least affected by agricultural management and under variable moisture regimes (i.e., floods vs. droughts, wet-dry cycles), 3) Linking DSM with geophysical, biological, and agricultural data and models to examine and predict the effects of novel wetland and drainage management practices. These projects are built around a suite of field, laboratory, and computational tools that will allow us to work at multiple scales. In the first project, we will develop our DSM toolkit at the sub-watershed scale. In the second project, we will examine properties and ecosystem services at the field and wetland scale and ask some specific process questions at the microcosm scale in an incubation experiment. Finally, in the third project, we will scale up the results from the first project to the regional scale, and use these scaled up maps to, in turn, scale up the results of the second project. Collectively, these projects will give us a regional map of hydric soil ecosystem services. Then, we can explore how hydric soil ecosystem services might respond to climate and land use change under different management scenarios designed to create more complex, resilient systems. This multi-tool, multi-scale approach will inform decision makers interested in how Prairie agro-ecosystems might better adapt to a changing climate.