Water quality impairments remain a pressing concern in the United States. Selecting appropriate management actions (i.e., best management practices) to improve water quality involves tradeoffs between cost and effectiveness, both of which are prone to uncertainty. In addition, significant uncertainties exist in the scientific understanding of the natural system. To address these concerns, we have developed a framework to identify the optimal set of actions to reduce turbidity and sedimentation in the Minnesota River Basin, while explicitly incorporating uncertainty. The framework combines Bayesian inference with multiobjective programming models to select the optimal combination of research actions, which improve...
The second groundwater quality study of the Chemung River Basin in south-central New York was conducted as part of the U.S. Geological Survey 305(b) water-quality-monitoring program. Water samples were collected from five production wells and five private residential wells from October through December 2008. The samples were analyzed to characterize the chemical quality of the groundwater. Five of the wells are screened in sand and gravel aquifers, and five are finished in bedrock aquifers. Two of these wells were also sampled for the first Chemung River Basin study of 2003. Samples were analyzed for 6 physical properties and 217 constituents, including nutrients, major inorganic ions, trace elements, radionuclides,...
The importance of P originating from agricultural sources to the nonpoint source pollution of surface waters has been an environmental issue for decades because of the well-known role of P in eutrophication. Most previous research and nonpoint source control efforts have emphasized P losses by surface erosion and runoff because of the relative immobility of P in soils. Consequently, P leaching and losses of P via subsurface runoff have rarely been considered important pathways for the movement of agricultural P to surface waters. However, there are situations where environmentally significant export of P in agricultural drainage has occurred (e.g., deep sandy soils, high organic matter soils, or soils with high...
