Search

Tile drainage is one of the dominant agricultural management practices in the United States and has greatly expanded since the late 1990s. It has proven effects on land surface water balance and quantity and quality of streamflow at the local scale. The effect of tile drainage on crop production, hydrology, and the environment on a regional scale is elusive due to lack of high-resolution, spatially-explicit tile drainage area information for the Contiguous United States (CONUS). We developed a 30-m resolution tile drainage map of the most-likely tile-drained area of the CONUS (AgTile-US) from county-level tile drainage census using a geospatial model that uses soil drainage information and topographic slope as inputs. Validation of AgTile-US with 16000 ground truth points indicated 86.03% accuracy at the CONUS-scale. Over the heavily tile-drained midwestern regions of the U.S., the accuracy ranges from 82.7% to 93.6%. These data can be used to study and model the hydrologic and water quality responses of tile drainage and to enhance streamflow forecasting in tile drainage dominant regions.

The mosquito virus vector Aedes ( Ae. ) aegypti exploits a wide range of containers as sites for egg laying and development of the immature life stages, yet the approaches for modeling meteorologically sensitive container water dynamics have been limited. This study introduces the Water Height and Temperature in Container Habitats Energy Model (WHATCH'EM), a state-of-the-science, physically based energy balance model of water height and temperature in containers that may serve as development sites for mosquitoes. The authors employ WHATCH'EM to model container water dynamics in three cities along a climatic gradient in México ranging from sea level, where Ae. aegypti is highly abundant, to ~2100 m, where Ae. aegypti is rarely found. When compared with measurements from a 1-month field experiment in two of these cities during summer 2013, WHATCH'EM realistically simulates the daily mean and range of water temperature for a variety of containers. To examine container dynamics for an entire season, WHATCH'EM is also driven with field-derived meteorological data from May to September 2011 and evaluated for three commonly encountered container types. WHATCH'EM simulates the highly nonlinear manner in which air temperature, humidity, rainfall, clouds, and container characteristics (shape, size, and color) determine water temperature and height. Sunlight exposure, modulated by clouds and shading from nearby objects, plays a first-order role. In general, simulated water temperatures are higher for containers that are larger, darker, and receive more sunlight. WHATCH'EM simulations will be helpful in understanding the limiting meteorological and container-related factors for proliferation of Ae. aegypti and may be useful for informing weather-driven early warning systems for viruses transmitted by Ae. aegypti .