Project team members have continued to engage in a wide variety of outreach events and activities including giving presentations at agricultural meetings, academic conferences and farmer outreach events such as field days; hosting watershed tours; and participating in educational events and webinars. These are opportunities to share our preliminary findings with the agricultural and scientific community and also the public. Highlights have included invited talks at the American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on Extreme Climate Event Impacts on Aquatic Biogeochemical Cycles and Fluxes, Puerto Rico, and at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography 2017 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Hawaii; as well as the November 2016 Notre Dame Shamrock Series Lecture in San Antonio, Texas. Project PI Jennifer Tank also chaired a special session on “Quantifying water quality outcomes of watershed-scale conservation projects” at the Universities Council On Water Resources Annual Conference in Colorado in June 2017, at which all of the project graduate students presented project data. We also continue to maintain our online presence via our website and social media accounts which provide a place to share results, updates and project resources e.g. one-page data summaries. An outreach summary is provided in Table 2 and a full list is provided in Appendix 2.
Led by PhD student Brittany Hanrahan, we have been preparing a manuscript describing the first 4 years of stream and tile drain results from the SDW for submission to Environmental Science & Technology, hoping to reach a large, international audience in this high-impact journal. A new manuscript describing our work on creating a new two-stage ditch module for the SWAT model (using data from this project for calibration) has been accepted by Ecological Engineering and should be in press in the next few months. In addition, Sheila Christopher is working on a manuscript describing the changes we have measured in watershed soils as a result of cover crop planting.
We continue to have open dialogue between the County Soil and Water Conservation Districts (in each watershed), the Nature Conservancy, and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University and Iowa State University researchers, which is essential for the success of conservation practice implementation and data collection.
Refer to attached document for outreach table.