Nature Water
Nature Water
8 months ago

Aquifer depletion exacerbates agricultural drought losses in the US High Plains

Aquifer depletion exacerbates agricultural drought losses in the US High Plains
Taro Mieno, Timothy Foster, Shunkei Kakimoto, Nicholas Brozović
Aquifer depletion poses a major threat to the ability of farmers, food supply chains and rural economies globally to use groundwater as a means of adapting to climate variability and change. Empirical research has demonstrated the large differences in drought risk exposure that exist between rainfed and irrigated croplands, but previous work commonly assumes water supply for the latter is unconstrained. Here we evaluate how aquifer depletion affects the resilience of irrigated crop production to drought risk using over 30 years of data on historical corn and soybean yields, production areas and aquifer conditions for the High Plains region in the United States. We show that aquifer depletion reduces the ability of farmers to sustain irrigated crop yields and production areas in years and locations with large growing-season water deficits. Our findings demonstrate that drought-related production losses on irrigated croplands increase non-linearly with aquifer depletion, highlighting the need for proactive aquifer conservation interventions to support adaptation and resilience to future increases in rainfall variability under climate change.

Publisher URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00173-7

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-023-00173-7

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.