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

粮食安全和水安全是我们日益增长的全球人口面临的两大挑战。然而，为了成功应对这些挑战，我们需要认真平衡有时被视为相互竞争的需求：最大限度地扩大生产性土地基础，同时最大限度地减少对水质和水量的潜在负面影响，并最大限度地增加农业景观中的其他生态系统服务。这些包括那些服务，如碳储存，水过滤和养分循环提供的与小湿地和间歇性溪流有关的含水土壤。拟议的计划将提供必要的信息和必要的工具，以解决草原坑洼地区（PPR）的这一平衡行为，该地区跨越75万平方公里，包括加拿大大草原的大部分农田。该计划由三个互补项目组成，填补了我们目前对含水土壤及其在农业生态系统中的作用的理解的空白：1）开发一个数字土壤制图（DSM）工具包，我们可以用它来改善我们对湿地和溪流及其相关土壤类型的位置的制图，2）确定哪些湿地和河岸土壤过程受农业管理和可变湿度制度（即，洪水与干旱、干湿循环），3）将DSM与地球物理、生物和农业数据和模型联系起来，以检查和预测新的湿地和排水管理实践的影响。这些项目是围绕一套现场，实验室和计算工具，使我们能够在多个尺度上工作。在第一个项目中，我们将在子流域尺度上开发我们的DSM工具包。在第二个项目中，我们将在田间和湿地尺度上研究属性和生态系统服务，并在孵化实验中在微观尺度上提出一些具体的过程问题。最后，在第三个项目中，我们将把第一个项目的结果扩大到区域范围，并使用这些扩大的地图来扩大第二个项目的结果。总的来说，这些项目将为我们提供一个地区性的水文土壤生态系统服务地图。然后，我们可以探索在旨在创建更复杂，更有弹性的系统的不同管理方案下，含水土壤生态系统服务如何应对气候和土地利用变化。这种多工具、多尺度的方法将为决策者提供信息，让他们了解草原农业生态系统如何更好地适应不断变化的气候。

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.