Complex hydrologic changes in frequency-magnitude response due to shifting agricultural practices in the Midwestern U.S.

Abstract:

Hydrologic change is occurring in many basins throughout the Midwestern U.S. not only in the mean annual streamflow but across a spectrum of magnitudes and frequencies. Disentangling the causative mechanisms responsible for these changes such as anthropogenic factors, e.g., artificial drainage to increase agricultural productivity, and climatic shifts in precipitation patterns is important for planning effective mitigation strategies. We have begun unraveling these changes in a human impacted agricultural landscape in the Midwestern U.S., specifically two subbasins of the Minnesota River Basin in Minnesota: the Redwood and Whetstone River Basins, where there has been a shift in agriculture from small grains to soybeans. This shift occurred at different times for each basin (1976 and 1991, respectively) and when soy covered about 20% of the basin area an apparent shift in the hydrologic regime also occurred as evidence by visual inspection of the hydrographs. Precisely quantifying the nature of this hydrologic regime shift however is a challenge and this work adds in this direction. Using Copulas and the joint probability distribution of daily precipitation and streamflow, we quantified a significantly higher dependence between precipitation and streamflow increments in the mid-quantiles (0.1-0.6; attributed to the artificial drainage to the stream rather than the slower infiltration and subsurface runoff) and no significant change for high quantiles (because for extreme storms the artificially fast drainage does not differ much hydrologically from the naturally fast overland flow). We further performed a multi-scale analysis of streamflow increments via wavelets to quantify the changes in the magnitude and frequency of the rising and falling limbs of hydrographs, confirming the above findings. Since precipitation changes were confirmed not to be significant, it is suggested that streamflow changes are largely driven by a change in land use and not climate in these basins. The implications of these changes for sediment production and transport and the ecologic integrity of these rivers are important and relevant to management decisions.