Impacts of potato and maize management and climate change on groundwater recharge across the Central Sands

The Wisconsin Central Sands region irrigates 80,000 hectares of potato, maize, pea, and bean crops by pumping groundwater from a coarse, shallow aquifer. The expansion and intensification of irrigated agriculture and recent surface water stresses have led to a community conflict over groundwater in this region. Effective regional groundwater management requires an increased understanding of groundwater recharge and evapotranspiration from irrigated cropping systems. The overarching goal of this project was to quantify on-farm crop ET and potential groundwater recharge for dominant crop rotations in the Wisconsin Central Sands with greater spatial and temporal resolution than previous endeavors to test causal relationships and collect physiological and biophysical data required to parameterize and calibrate a process-based agroecosystem model of ET and recharge for the Wisconsin Central Sands.