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Abstract Efficiently managing agricultural irrigation is vital for food security today and into the future under climate change. Yet, evaluating agriculture’s hydrological impacts and strategies to reduce them remains challenging due to a lack of field-scale data on crop water consumption. Here, we develop a method to fill this gap using remote sensing and machine learning, and leverage it to assess water saving strategies in California’s Central Valley. We find that switching to lower water intensity crops can reduce consumption by up to 93%, but this requires adopting uncommon crop types. Northern counties have substantially lower irrigation efficiencies than southern counties, suggesting another potential source of water savings. Other practices that do not alter land cover can save up to 11% of water consumption. These results reveal diverse approaches for achieving sustainable water use, emphasizing the potential of sub-field scale crop water consumption maps to guide water management in California and beyond.
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Water Security Assessment for the Contiguous United States Using Water Footprint Concepts
Abstract Water security is tightly connected with the food security, ecological health, and economic prosperity of a region. In this study, a comprehensive water security assessment based on water footprint concepts from 1995 to 2015 was performed for the counties located in the Contiguous States of the Unites States. The availability of blue water (e.g., surface water) is comparatively less in the western river basins, and most of the rainfed agricultural lands in the eastern United States were characterized by the lower levels of green water (e.g., root zone soil moisture) storage. This integrated assessment of the water security indicators can directly map the critical regions and reveal the dependence between human water consumption, crop water requirements and environmental flow. This analysis can be further extended to incorporate climate change and extreme drought events to inform specific locations (e.g., counties and watersheds) at which problems of water conflict are more likely to occur.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1653841
- PAR ID:
- 10455676
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Volume:
- 47
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0094-8276
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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