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Dr. Hamlet will speak about several adaptation strategies that may help reduce the projected future impacts of climate change on nutrient pollution originating from Midwest agricultural areas.
Nutrient pollution originating from Midwest agricultural areas has reached crisis levels in recent decades, with major ecosystem impacts regularly occurring in the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie. Climate change is expected to bring profound warming and increasing cool-season precipitation to the Midwest region. Increased precipitation combined with loss of snow cover in winter is projected to result in increased nutrient runoff from fallow farmland. Several adaptation strategies, however, may help reduce these projected future impacts, including use of winter cover crops and reduced fertilizer application. Cover crops, for example, have been shown to be effective at reducing nutrient runoff for historical conditions, and modeling studies show that cover crops work even better under climate change, reducing nutrient losses to historical levels with cover crops, despite increasing losses due to climate change alone. Thus use of cover crops is shown to be an effective and sustainable adaptation strategy for our region. Despite these encouraging results, cover crops alone may not be sufficient to decrease ecosystem impacts to acceptable levels, and additional climate change adaptation strategies, such as reductions in fertilizer application, or use of “smart” drainage systems, will likely be needed.
Dr. Alan F. Hamlet is an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in the integrated computer modeling of climate, hydrologic systems, water resources systems, and ecosystems. Over the last 25 years Dr. Hamlet has been involved extensively in integrated modeling studies in North America (e.g. in the western, central, and southeastern U.S.) as well as at the global scale. Recent large-scale efforts include climate change impacts assessment for the entire Midwest and Great Lakes region, and scenarios supporting the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment [https://ag.purdue.edu/indianaclimate/].