Comment on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States” by Satish C. Gupta et al.

Foufoula‐Georgiou, Efi; Belmont, Patrick; Wilcock, Peter Richard; Gran, Karen B.; Finlay, Jacques C.; Czuba, Jonathan A.; Schwenk, Jon; Takbiri, Zeinab

doi:10.1002/2015wr018494

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Foufoula‐Georgiou et al . [] identify the critical questions that need to be answered in understanding the role of climate and land use land cover (LULC) changes on streamflow in the upper Midwestern United States. We agree with these research objectives but we disagree that Gupta et al .…”

Section: Selected Annual Precipitation and Streamflow (Gage = 0531650supporting

confidence: 94%

Reply to comment by Foufoula‐Georgiou et al. on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States”

Gupta

Kessler

Brown

et al. 2016

Water Resources Research

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Section: Selected Annual Precipitation and Streamflow (Gage = 0531650supporting

confidence: 94%

Reply to comment by Foufoula‐Georgiou et al. on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States”

Gupta

Kessler

Brown

et al. 2016

Water Resources Research

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“…The overall influence of agricultural land cover and of changing agricultural practices on streamflows across the Midwest has led to heated debates in recent years [20,[69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. In the Upper Mississippi River Basin, LULC has a clear signature on streamflow [77].…”

Section: Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the Drivers of Seasonal Streamflow in the U.S. Midwest

Slater

Villarini

2017

Water

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Streamflows have increased notably across the U.S. Midwest over the past century, fueling a debate on the relative influences of changes in precipitation and land cover on the flow distribution. Here, we propose a simple modeling framework to evaluate the main drivers of streamflow rates. Streamflow records from 290 long-term USGS stream gauges were modeled using five predictors: precipitation, antecedent wetness, temperature, agriculture, and population density. We evaluated which predictor combinations performed best for every site, season and streamflow quantile. The goodness-of-fit of our models is generally high and varies by season (higher in the spring and summer than in the fall and winter), by streamflow quantile (best for high flows in the spring and winter, best for low flows in the fall, and good for all flow quantiles in summer), and by region (better in the southeastern Midwest than in the northwestern Midwest). In terms of predictors, we find that precipitation variability is key for modeling high flows, while antecedent wetness is a crucial secondary driver for low and median flows. Temperature improves model fits considerably in areas and seasons with notable snowmelt or evapotranspiration. Finally, in agricultural and urban basins, harvested acreage and population density are important predictors of changing streamflow, and their influence varies seasonally. Thus, any projected changes in these drivers are likely to have notable effects on future streamflow distributions, with potential implications for basin water management, agriculture, and flood risk management.

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“…For example, humans have substantially altered the timing and magnitude of evapotranspiration, have dammed, channelized and leveed waterways, and have installed artificial drainage networks in former wetlands (Boucher et al, 2004;Dumanski et al, 2015;Rockström et al, 2014;Schottler et al, 2014;Vörösmarty et al, 2004) . While it is inevitable that 15 wetland removal and artificial drainage will change rainfall-runoff processes, the effects of drainage on the hydrologic cycle may be subtle and difficult to discern, and may manifest differently at different spatial scales and times of year (e.g., Bullock and Acreman, 2003;Foufoula-Georgiou et al, 2016;Irwin and Whiteley, 1983;O'Connell et al, 2007). Systematic increases in streamflows (peak flows, total flow, base flows) are widely reported in the Midwestern US and attributed to changes in land use (including widespread conversion from perennial vegetation, such as grasses, to annual 20 row crops, primarily corn and soybean, and the addition of artificial drainage) and climate (increase in precipitation and earlier snowmelt) (e.g.…”

Section: Whether Humans Climate or Both Have Caused Streamflow Changmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human amplified changes in precipitation-runoff patterns in large river basins of the Midwestern United States

Kelly¹,

Takbiri²,

Belmont³

et al. 2016

Preprint

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Abstract. Complete transformations of land cover from prairie, wetlands, and hardwood forests to homogenous row crop agriculture scattered with urban centers are thought to have caused profound changes in hydrology in the Upper Midwestern US since the 1800s. Continued intensification of land use and drainage practices combined with increased precipitation have 10 caused many Midwest watersheds to exhibit higher streamflows today than in the historical past. While changes in crop type and farming practices have been well documented over the past few decades, changes in artificial surface (ditch) and subsurface (tile) drainage systems have not. This makes it difficult to quantitatively disentangle the effects of climate change and artificial drainage intensification on the observed hydrologic change, often spurring controversial interpretations with significant implications for management actions. In this study, we investigate four large (23,000-69,000 km 2 ) Midwest river 15 basins that span climate and land use gradients to understand how climate and agricultural drainage have influenced basin hydrology over the last 79 years. We use daily, monthly, and annual flow metrics to document streamflow changes and discuss those changes in the context of climate and land use change. While we detect similar timing of precipitation and streamflow changes in each basin, overall the magnitude and significance of precipitation changes are much less than we detect for streamflows. Of the basins containing greater than 20% area drained by tile and ditches, we observe 2 to 4 fold 20 increases in low flows and 1.5 to 3 fold increases in high and extreme flows. Monthly precipitation has increased slightly for some months in each basin, mostly in fall and winter months (August -March), but total monthly streamflow has increased in all months for the Minnesota River Basin (MRB), every month but April for the Red River Basin (RRB), SeptemberDecember and March in the Illinois River Basin (IRB), and no months in the Chippewa River basin (CRB). Using a water budget, we determined that the soil moisture/groundwater storage term for the intensively drained and cultivated MRB, IRB, 25and RRB, has decreased by about 200%, 100%, and 30%, respectively while increased by roughly 30% in the largely forested CRB since 1975. We argue that agricultural land use change, through wetland removal and artificial drainage installation, has decreased watershed storage and amplified the streamflow response to precipitation increases in the Midwest. Highly managed basins with large reservoirs and urban centers, such as the Illinois River basin (IRB), may be able to buffer some of these impacts better than largely unregulated systems such as the Minnesota River (MRB) and Red River 30

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Comment on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States” by Satish C. Gupta et al.

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Reply to comment by Foufoula‐Georgiou et al. on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States”

Reply to comment by Foufoula‐Georgiou et al. on “Climate and agricultural land use change impacts on streamflow in the upper midwestern United States”

Evaluating the Drivers of Seasonal Streamflow in the U.S. Midwest

Human amplified changes in precipitation-runoff patterns in large river basins of the Midwestern United States

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