As blue water resources become increasingly scarce with more frequent droughts and overuse, irrigated agriculture faces significant challenges to reduce its water footprint while maintaining high levels of crop production. Building soil health has been touted as an important means of enhancing the resilience of agroecosystems to drought, mainly with a focus in rainfed systems reliant on green water through increases in infiltration and soil water storage. Yet, green water often contributes only a small fraction of the total crop water budget in irrigated agricultural regions. To scope the potential for how soil health management could impact water resources in irrigated systems, we review how soil health affects soil water flows, plant–soil–microbe interactions, and plant water capture and productive use. We assess how these effects could interact with irrigation management to help make green and blue water use more sustainable. We show how soil health management could (1) optimize green water availability (e.g., by increasing infiltration and soil water storage), (2) maximize productive water flows (e.g., by reducing evaporation and supporting crop growth), and (3) reduce blue water withdrawals (e.g., by minimizing the impacts of water stress on crop productivity). Quantifying the potential of soil health to improve water resource management will require research that focuses on outcomes for green and blue water provisioning and crop production under different irrigation and crop management strategies. Such information could be used to improve and parameterize finer scale crop, soil, and hydraulic models, which in turn must be linked with larger scale hydrologic models to address critical water-resources management questions at watershed or regional scales. While integrated soil health-water management strategies have considerable potential to conserve water—especially compared to irrigation technologies that enhance field-level water use efficiency but often increase regional water use—transitions to these strategies will depend on more than technical understanding and must include addressing interrelated structural and institutional barriers. By scoping a range of ways enhancing soil health could improve resilience to water limitations and identifying key research directions, we inform research and policy priorities aimed at adapting irrigated agriculture to an increasingly challenging future.
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This content will become publicly available on March 25, 2025
Not Just Algorithms: Strategically Addressing Consumer Impacts in Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval (IR) systems have a wide range of impacts on *consumers*.
We offer maps to help identify goals IR systems could---or should---strive for,
and guide the process of *scoping how to gauge a wide range of consumer-side
impacts and the possible interventions needed to address these effects. Grounded
in prior work on scoping algorithmic impact efforts, our goal is to promote and
facilitate research that (1) is grounded in impacts on information consumers,
contextualizing these impacts in the broader landscape of positive and negative
consumer experience; (2) takes a broad view of the possible means of changing or
improving that impact, including non-technical interventions; and (3) uses
operationalizations and strategies that are well-matched to the technical,
social, ethical, legal, and other dimensions of the specific problem in
question.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2415042
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10497110
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ECIR 2024: Advances in Information Retrieval
- Volume:
- 14611
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 314-335
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["information access","consumer-side impacts","algorithmic harms"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Civil engineering education must be updated to keep pace with the profession and move past a culture of disengagement where technical work is considered separate from societal impact. Civil engineering students need to engage with diversity, equity, inclusion and justice (DEIJ) so they can understand the differential impacts of engineering on individuals from different groups within society. We aim to encourage the transformation of civil engineering education to produce engineers that will be prepared to meaningfully engage with society and advance justice in their future professional roles by providing examples of pedagogical change and analyzing student responses. In this study we implemented new course assignments in an introductory civil engineering course and a civil engineering materials course. In the introductory assignment students were taught to draw systems models and asked to consider social and technical factors contributing to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In the materials course students completed pre-class readings about a regional highway reconstruction project, including articles about neighborhood opposition to the project, and participated in an in-class discussion. We analyzed student submissions using qualitative content analysis. Students in both courses (33% introductory, 60% materials) described learning about the impact engineering designs had on the community. In the materials class students were asked specifically about the impact of race and wealth on infrastructure decision-making. Student responses showed a wide range in how students understood the history of the situation and dynamics of power and privilege. Errors and limitations in student responses point to specific ways the instructors can improve student learning. Our results demonstrate that the integration of activities about societal impact is possible in technical engineering courses, emphasize the importance of integrating social context and related DEIJ content into technical courses, and provide insights into what students perceived they learned from the activities.more » « less
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