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Stream restoration has become an increasingly important focus in southwestern Wisconsin's Driftless Area, an unglaciated, hilly pocket of the Upper Mississippi River Basin rich in groundwater-driven coldwater streams, recreationally important trout species, and agricultural communities. Climate change is driving a major increase in precipitation and flooding across this rural and often under-resourced region, effects complicated by the ongoing legacies of white settlement and the changes it wrought to area streams, including the burial of floodplains in sediment displaced off area hillslopes. As managers work to consider how to “restore” Driftless streams, riparian vegetation—grass versus trees—has become a central and surprisingly controversial node. Current stream restoration practice typically includes the removal of riparian trees, though that practice has come under increasing criticism. Grounded in more than 5 years of qualitative and biophysical fieldwork in the region, we build from interviews gathered with 18 Driftless Area stream restoration managers from 2018 to 2020 to point to the ways that managers leverage arguments about erosion, flooding, habitat, and angler access, among other things, in service of grass and trees. Indexing the surface flows and underflows of this restoration debate, we introduce the rhetorical concept of the proxy debate to argue that debates about grass versus trees are tethered to competing perspectives on scale, temporality, and dynamism, surficial distractions from much deeper anxieties about what a stream is and should be. We turn to the ways that these distractions serve to further distance the stream restoration enterprise from acknowledging the ongoing human and hydrologic legacies of settler colonialism, and we close by suggesting that careful attention to rhetorical power—both to what arguments say and do, and to what they elide—offers a tentative first step toward restoring lands and relations by questioning what is taken for granted and what lies beneath.

 

Dominant forms of agricultural production in the U.S. Upper Midwest are undermining human health and well being. Restoring critical ecosystem functions to agriculture is key to stabilizing climate, reducing flooding, cleaning water, and enhancing biodiversity. We used simulation models to compare ecosystem functions (food-energy production, nutrient retention, and water infiltration) provided by vegetation associated with continuous corn, corn-soybean rotation, and perennial grassland producing feed for dairy livestock. Compared to continuous corn, most ecosystem functions dramatically improved in the perennial grassland system (nitrate leaching reduced ~90%, phosphorus loss reduced ~88%, drainage increased ~25%, evapotranspiration reduced ~29%), which will translate to improved ecosystem services. Our results emphasize the need to incentivize multiple ecosystem services when managing agricultural landscapes. 

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) specifies the use of biofuels in the United States and thereby guides nearly half of all global biofuel production, yet outcomes of this keystone climate and environmental regulation remain unclear. Here we combine econometric analyses, land use observations, and biophysical models to estimate the realized effects of the RFS in aggregate and down to the scale of individual agricultural fields across the United States. We find that the RFS increased corn prices by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%, which, in turn, expanded US corn cultivation by 2.8 Mha (8.7%) and total cropland by 2.1 Mha (2.4%) in the years following policy enactment (2008 to 2016). These changes increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8%, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5%, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher. These tradeoffs must be weighed alongside the benefits of biofuels as decision-makers consider the future of renewable energy policies and the potential for fuels like corn ethanol to meet climate mitigation goals. 

The manureshed concept aims to rebalance surplus manure nutrients produced at animal feeding operations (sources) and the demands from nutrient‐deficient croplands (sinks) to reduce negative environmental impacts and utilize nutrients more efficiently. Due to water quality implications, studies focused on this rebalancing have typically created domain boundaries that match a particular watershed. However, a majority of agricultural datasets that are used to inform these analyses—specifically, livestock populations—are only available at the county scale, which generally does not match watershed boundaries. The common method used to address this mismatch is to weight the county statistics based on the proportion of watershed area within the county. However, these straightforward assumptions imply that animal density is uniform across a county, which can be highly problematic, especially in an era of increasing concentration of livestock production on a smaller land area. We present a case study of the Lake Mendota watershed in south‐central Wisconsin using both a typical county‐based downscaled dataset as well as a more spatially explicit dataset of livestock counts from the Census of Agriculture that aggregates a set of zip codes that best matches the watershed boundary. This comparison reveals a substantial difference in estimated livestock numbers and their associated manure production that is due to a concentration of dairy operations within the watershed compared with the rest of the county. We argue that sub‐county scale data need to become more available and integrated into nutrient and water quality management efforts so that manuresheds can be more effectively delineated and implemented.