Economics Commons^™

Shifts In Precipitation And Agricultural Intensity Increase Phosphorus Concentrations And Loads In An Agricultural Watershed, Donald M. Waller, Andrew G. Meyer, Zach Raff, Steven I. Apfelbaum

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Fertilizers and manure applied to cropland to increase yields are often lost via surface erosion, soil leaching, and runoff, increasing nutrient loads in surface and sub-surface waters, degrading water quality, and worsening the ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. We leverage spatial and temporal variation in agricultural practices and precipitation events to examine how these factors affect stream total phosphorus (TP) concentrations and loads in the Sugar River (Wisconsin), recently listed as impaired. To perform our analysis, we first collected water quality data from 1995 to 2017 from 40 sites along the Sugar River and its tributaries. Starting in …