The Influence of Groundwater Depletion from Irrigated Agriculture on the Tradeoffs between Ecosystem Services and Economic Returns

Abstract

An irrigated agricultural landscape experiencing groundwater overdraft generates economic returns and a suite of ecosystem services (in particular, groundwater supply, greenhouse gases reduction, and surface water quality). Alternative land cover choices indicate tradeoffs among the value of ecosystem services created and the economic returns. These tradeoffs are explored using efficiency frontiers that determine the least value in ecosystem services that must be given up to generate additional economic returns. Agricultural producers may switch to irrigation with surface water using on-farm reservoirs and tail water recovery systems in response to groundwater overdraft, and this has consequences for the bundle of ecosystem service values and economic returns achievable from the landscape. Planning that accounts for both ecosystem service value and economic returns can achieve more value for society, as does the adoption of reservoirs though lowering the costs of irrigation, increasing groundwater levels, and reducing fuel combustion and associated GHG emissions from groundwater pumping. Sensitivity analyses of per unit value of ecosystem services, crop prices, and the groundwater and water purification model parameters indicate tradeoff among ecosystems service values, such as the use of a high-end social cost of carbon ultimately lowers groundwater supply and water purification value by more than 15%.

Large-scale biometry with interpretable neural network regression on UK Biobank body MRI

“…The variability between these two established reference methods can largely be accounted for by differing regions of interest. Whereas the atlas-based method measures VAT up to the thoracic vertebrae Th9 20 , DXA defines VAT as ranging from the top of the iliac crest up to 20% of the distance to the base of the skull 24 . This is reflected in the saliency maps of Fig.…”

“…The measurements of the arms and legs from DXA, in contrast, contain outliers and are often based on anatomy that is not entirely contained in the field of view. Including additional imaging stations that would cover the lower legs and head could lead to both more robust inference and better agreement with the DXA measurements, but was rejected during the original study design due to the prohibitive total increase in scan time 20 . Future studies may benefit from a less targeted acquisition and instead choose to collect less restricted, more comprehensive data, as increasingly powerful tools for automated analysis become available.…”

“…All scans were acquired by the UK Biobank at three different centres in the United Kingdom in an imaging time of about six minutes each, using a dual-echo Dixon technique 19 on a Siemens Aera 1.5T device. The resulting image data typically covers the body from neck to knee in six separate stations, whereas the arms and other parts of the body that extend laterally are usually not visible or subject to heavy distortion and artefacts 20 . For the experiments in this work, those scans that contained water-fat swaps and other artefacts such as excessive noise, unusual positioning and artificial knee replacements were excluded by visual inspection of the projections by one operator, leaving 31,172 images for training and validation.…”

“…More than half of the chosen fields are measurements of body composition by DXA imaging 11 , 22 , comprising mass and percentages of fat and lean tissue in the abdomen, trunk, arms and legs. The second largest group of measurements is based on multi-atlas segmentations of the neck-to-knee body MRI itself 20 , 23 , 24 and describe volumes of adipose tissue depots and muscle groups in the abdomen, trunk and thighs. An additional group of fields contains the basic features of age, sex (1 for male, 0 for female), height, and weight.…”

Productivity and Profitability of Four Crop Rotations under Limited Irrigation

“…However, continuous use of ground water for full irrigation of crops results in the rapid depletion of the water level which threatens sustainability (Scanlon et al, 2012). Rapid depletion of ground water level also results in continuous increases in cost of production as water has to be pumped from deeper depths every year (Lilienfeld and Asmild, 2007;Kovacs and West, 2016). Use of limited amounts of irrigation water or a supplemental irrigation system, which recognizes a responsible use of ground water proportional to the annual replenishment, was suggested by researchers.…”