Science to Examine the Interactions Between Climate, Agriculture, and Water Quality

The purpose of the project was to conduct an extensive search for completed and ongoing research that deals with climate change and agriculture in the context of water quality, for the Eastern Tallgrass Prairie and Big Rivers Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) and the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes LCC. 

The search to acquire this information was two-fold. One portion of the search dealt with an online literature search for published peer-reviewed articles for the period of approximately 2000 to present. The second portion of the search dealt with contacting US Geological Survey (USGS) Water Science Centers and state institutions to request information on current research projects dealing with this topic that have not yet been published or are currently in publication. Geographic location was considered during the search, and only projects and publications taking place within one of the LCC’s were acquired. The two LCC’s cover partial states in some cases, but searches were conducted for the state as a whole if any portion of the state fell within one of the two LCC's. In addition, relevant publications were obtained for southern Ontario, Canada. An outline for search methodology, including sources and keywords, was used to keep the search process consistent and well-documented. In addition, manual filtering of results was required to ensure that they were both contextually and geographically relevant. While the effort was likely not entirely exhaustive, the methodology entailed a progression of searches using multiple search engines and resources that upon completion did not return any results that had not already been acquired. The software tool EndNote was selected for compiling the database as this tool assisted in streamlining the process of publication retrieval during the literature search. It also standardized the way in which publications were recorded and provided a means to organize, reduce redundancy, and search the database. The resulting products for each LCC were aggregated to produce one final EndNote library. The library was categorized by geographic location but can be categorized using various criteria and keyword searches within EndNote. Through cooperation with the Center for Integrated Data Analytics (CIDA), a searchable format geared toward the general end-user can be generated.