Introducing a One-Stop Resource for Wind Erosion, Air Quality, and Dust Mitigation (webinar)

Southern U.S. Dust Monitoring and Mitigation Symposium 2018

Presentations:

• Addressing climate impacts to agricultural production: how dust monitoring and mitigation aligns with climate adaptation efforts in the U.S. by Emile Elias, PH.D., Director, Southwest Climate Hub
• Climate and weather patterns associated to wind erosion by David Dubois, Ph.D., New Mexico State Climatologist
• Potential for mitigating wind erosion in the Sonoran Desert using organic amendments and microbes to build soil aggregates by Joseph Blankinship, Assistant Professor, Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Science, University of Arizona
• AERO, a wind erosion modeling framework with applications to monitoring data by Brandon L. Edwards, Research Assistant Professor, Jornada Experimental Range, New Mexico State University
• Characterization of surface dust emission potential using a Portable In-Situ Wind Erosion Laboratory (PI-SWERL) for numerical modeling applications by Nancy E. Parker, US Army Engineer Research & Dev Center
• Rangeland restoration and dust mitigation on the Colorado Plateau by Stephen E. Fick, Postdoctoral Research Ecologist, USGS Southwest Biological Science Center
• Wind erosion mitigation - a guide to understanding USDA’s efforts in addressing the concerns with wind erosion by Stephen G. Smarik, NRCS Liaison to Southwest and Southern Plains Climate Hub

Outcomes:

• The aeolian research community hasn’t engaged well with climate impacts and adaptation research. The dust modelling community has engaged with climate modeling to assess aerosol impacts on radiative forcing and cloud nucleation, but using fairly simple models that do not represent land surface dynamics and their impacts on and feedbacks with aeolian processes. Land condition (influenced by aeolian processes) underpins the magnitude of climate impacts and efficacy of adaptation options, so making the linkages btwn aeolian processes, land degradation and climate change will be important.
• We have developed a reasonably good understanding of the climatic drivers of wind erosion and dust emission, but have some way to go in understanding the impacts of land use and land cover change, particularly in the context of ecosystem change through state transitions. Dust models currently oversimplify vegetation effects on transport and are insensitive to changes in vegetation structure typical of state transitions. Following this, we really haven’t explored aeolian process responses to regional ecosystem change – e.g., grass-shrub transitions, sagebrush-cheatgrass-fire-wind erosion interactions.
• New models like AERO are addressing the model deficiencies and uncertainties and should enable use to start addressing points 1 and 2 above.
• It will be important for the aeolian research community to consider how we report and describe “wind erosion” processes to managers/agencies. We typically model saltation and dust fluxes (not net erosion), so we need to better communicate what these mean and what impacts they may have on agroecosystems. In communicating to managers, we should also consider how these (somewhat intangible) fluxes relate to more common indicators like foliar cover, canopy gaps sizes, canopy height, soil texture,… The wind erosion handbook could discuss these issues.
• Tools like PiSWERL provide complementary information about dust emission potential of soils but we need to be very care about sample designs. Typically no-one using the instrument has used a robust/defensible sample design that would enable the data to be scaled or even interpreted through statistical analysis.
• A growing number of people are using the PiSWERL – perhaps now is a good time to develop a common database for storing and sharing PiSWERL data.
• A couple of the presenters nicely summarized the costs and benefits of dust mitigation options in tables that were accessible and could be a nice addition to the wind erosion handbook.