Toward Sustainability of the High Plains Aquifer Region: Coupled Landscape, Atmosphere, and Socioeconomic Systems (CLASS)

The High Plains region hosts some of the most productive irrigated agricultural land in the United States, made possible by one of the largest contiguous aquifer systems in the world. Much of the aquifer is already on a fundamentally unsustainable path, having been drawn down by approximately 300 cubic kilometers since the 1930s. Portions of the High Plains aquifer are already substantially depleted, necessitating large-scale conversion to dryland farming and disrupting physical and social systems in those areas. Various paths toward sustainability across this vast region will be dictated by a patchwork of state laws and regulations, complex economic drivers, highly variable soil productivity and saturated aquifer thicknesses, and climatic forecasts that predict increasing severity of existing regional precipitation gradients. A wealth of data already collected during decades of intense study affords the opportunity to revolutionize the understanding of feedbacks among climate, hydrology, acroecological, and social and economic sustainability across this vast region will be dictated by a patchwork of state laws and regulations, complex economic drivers, highly variable soil productivity and saturated thicknesses, and climatic forecasts that predict increasing severity of existing regional precipitation and evapotranspiration gradients. A wealth of data already collected during decades of intense study affords the opportunity to revolutionize the understanding of feedbacks among climate, hydrology, agroecosystems. Our interdisciplinary team proposes to simulate the coupled physical and socioeconomic systems of the High Plains region. We will link process-based climate, hydrology, dynamic vegetation, and econometrics models to explore historical changes. High-resolution remotely-sensed imagery will be used to develop and integrate a predictive spatially-distributed crop rotation model. Then for a range of social, economic, and climate forcing scenarios, we will predict what sustainable landscapes across the High Plains may look like, and will explore the impacts of a range of potential land management scenarios on the regional hydrology, climate, and economy.