1. Quantification of the impact of hydrology on agricultural production as a result of too dry, too wet or saline conditions
Mirjam Hack, Dennis Walvoort, Joop Kroes, Ruud Bartholomeus, Jan van Bakel and Jos van Dam
24 August 2015

2. Quantification of the impact of hydrology on agricultural production
Presentation
Background information
Modelling
Easily applicable tools:
simplified relations
soil physical parameters
examples

3. Quantification of the impact of hydrology on agricultural production
Background information
Why this project?
various users: regional government, water managers, drinking water companies -> new tool
for optimization of water management
for financial compensation for farmers
-> in case of water level changes to less optimal conditions
(existing tool is not trusted anymore)

4. Quantification of the impact of hydrology on agricultural production
New Tool: WaterVision Agriculture
(Dutch: Waterwijzer Landbouw)
End users (financers) have asked for:
new method, ‘climate proof’
current, existing knowledge
current and future climate
differences between years
effects of extreme weather events
current farm management
drought, saline conditions or
too wet conditions

5. Quantification of the impact of hydrology on agricultural production
WaterVision Agriculture:
Based on
hydrological simulation model SWAP and
crop growth model WOFOST.
Products:
linked models for experienced users +
easily applicable tools
simplified relations for assessing crop growth as a function of soil type and groundwater level.

6. SWAP: Soil-Water-Atmosphere-Plant System Atmosphere Plant
Precipitation / Irrigation
Atmosphere
interception
transpiration
soil-evaporation
Plant
Snow
surface runoff
Surface waters
saturated
Unsaturated
zone
drainage/
subsurface
infiltration
Saturated
- Transport of:
soil water
zone
drainage/
soil heat
subsurface
solutes (salts, tracers)
infiltration
- Influenced by:
Soil heterogeneity
Swelling and shrinking
deep percolation/
Hysteresis
seepage
Deep Groundwater

7. WOFOST (World Food Studies)

8. WOFOST

9. Results model testing: crop yields
grassland
silage maize
potato

10. Examples for application of WaterVision Agriculture
Yield reduction (%)
Variation between years
Variation within years

11. WaterVision Agriculture
Products:
linked models for experienced users
easily applicable tools and simplified relations, based on:
-> multiple SWAP-WOFOST runs
-> current weather + 3 climate scenarios
-> 5 weather stations
-> 72 units of soil physical map
-> 2 crops (grassland and silage maize)

12. Soil physical map BOFEK 2012 (Wösten et al)
BOFEK is a physical interpretation of the Dutch national Soil Map, scale 1 :
BOFEK is clustering of 315 soil units to 72 soil physical units (based on hydrologic assessments)
BOFEK provides soil physical characteristics (pF and k(h)) for soil layers per unit

14. WaterVision Agriculture
simplified relations, based on:
-> multiple SWAP-WOFOST runs
-> based on large parameter sets (meteorology, hydrological boundary conditions, soil data)
-> Latin hypercube sampling
Presentation simplified relations: online tool, GIS- applications, tables, graphs
first examples

15. WaterVision Agriculture
Example: grassland, marine clay soil
annual average drought stress (y-axis) as a function of mean highest groundwater level (x-axis)

16. WaterVision Agriculture
Example: silage maize, sandy soil (cambic podzol)
annual average oxygen stress (dot size) as a function of
-mean highest
groundwater level
(y-axis) and
-mean lowest
(x-axis)

17. WaterVision Agriculture
Example: silage maize, sandy soil (cambic podzol)
Both drought and oxygen stress (dot size, yield difference) as a function of
-mean highest
groundwater level
(y-axis) and
-mean lowest
(x-axis)

18. Concluding remarks
WaterVision Agriculture meets the requirements of the users and
is based on state-of-the-art process models on hydrology and crop growth
simplified relations, for 4 climate scenarios, 5 weather stations, 72 units of soil physical map and 2 crops (grassland and silage maize)
products:
linked models for experienced users
simplified relations (under construction) that can feed into
easily applicable tools

19. Thank you for your attention!