Agricultural Impacts on Groundwater Quality
High or increasing concentrations of contaminants originating from agricultural areas is a major concern for source water management. One approach to address this problem is to adopt beneficial management practices (BMPs). For agricultural areas impacted by excess nitrate applied as fertilizer, BMPs consist of optimized management of inorganic fertilizer and animal manure inputs in order to reduce contaminant loadings to aquifers.
The implementation of BMPs can affect both land use management and water quality and thus has potentially significant health and economic impacts. Areas targeted with BMPs and their associated contaminant mass loading must be carefully defined. Since the effects of changes in land-use practices are usually slow and difficult to monitor, there is a need to develop approaches and long-term predictive tools to support decision making.
To support this need various field and modelling approaches are being developed and applied at several sites in Canada where the groundwater quality has been degraded by nitrogen.
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