SCC-IRG Track 1: Connecting Farming Communities for Sustainable Crop Production and Environment Using Smart Agricultural Drainage Systems
Lead PI:
Liang Dong
Co-PI:
Abstract

In the US, agricultural drainage infrastructure benefits >22.6 Mha of cropland and is valued at ~$100B. As a proportion of total croplands, drained croplands produce a disproportionately large amount of grain but also release a disproportionately large amount of eutrophying nutrients to aquatic ecosystems. Drainage systems include individually-owned field drains that depend on the function of community-owned main drains. Climate change and agricultural intensification are causing farmers to increase the extent and intensity of drainage leading to a pressing need to balance productivity, profitability, and environmental quality when making drainage decisions. Further, because drainage systems include individually-owned and community-owned drains, decision-making involves complex techno-economic social issues together with understanding biophysical processes and requires balancing the needs of individual farmers, drainage communities, and surrounding regions. This project will develop an integrated decision-making platform to facilitate community decision making for precise prediction and management of drainage effects on water flow, crop production, farm net returns, and nutrient loss. The platform data will be made possible by new agricultural sensors and robots, innovations in behavioral economics and analytics tools. Development of the drainage decision-making platform will be guided by farmer stakeholders?including, the Iowa and Illinois Drainage Districts Associations, a national-level agricultural drainage management coalition, and directly with farmers?forming a continuous learning environment across scientists and farmers that fosters adoption of new technologies and transfer of the research process to the next generation of scientists, engineers, and agricultural professionals.

The project will build upon a suite of biophysical and social science advances in multiple areas, including bioinspired robotic snake sensors, in-situ soil nutrient sensors, computational modeling, and socioeconomics. The snake sensors will navigate through agricultural drainage networks to generate a high spatial resolution data stream about flow rates and nitrate concentrations throughout the belowground network. The soil sensors will enable continuous monitoring of nitrate dynamics. Process-based ecohydrological models, subsurface water transport models, and multiple spatiotemporal sensor outputs will be integrated to obtain high-resolution information about distributions of water and nitrate. Biophysical scenario analyses will assist decision-making for different agricultural management scenarios to balance resource use efficiency, profitability, and environmental performance. Socioeconomic science innovations will be integrated by learning how current systems are managed in the context of various heterogeneities across individuals and drainage districts, such as demographics, farm size, and presence of wetlands, and how new information provided by the proposed infrastructure interacts with human incentives and choices and consequent policy making.

Liang Dong

Liang Dong is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University. His research interests include Digital Communications and Signal Processing, Green Wireless Networks, Cyber-Physical System and Security, Social Internet of Things, and E-health Applications.

Liang Dong is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the American Physical Society (APS), and a member of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). He served on the executive board of IEEE West Michigan Section from 2006 to 2011 and the executive board of ASEE North Central Section from 2007 to 2008. He also served as a TPC member for IEEE HealthCom 2015, IEEE GlobalSIP 2015 and IEEE GlobalSIP 2016, and a session chair for IEEE WCNC 2013 and IEEE GlobalSIP 2016. He is a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Tau Beta Pi, and a faculty advisor of Eta Kappa Nu.

Performance Period: 10/01/2021 - 09/30/2025
Institution: Iowa State University
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 2125484