Groundwater and Agriculture Symposium Features Speakers from Arizona
On January 22, 2025, university, agency, and industry water experts gathered in Albuquerque, NM, to discuss groundwater and agriculture. The University of California-Davis Agricultural Water Center hosted its 3rd Annual USDA/UC-Davis Project Symposium, Southwest Groundwater and Sustainable Agricultural Systems, which reported on research carried out within the multi-university project.
As co-Principal Investigator for the five-year project, WRRC Director Sharon B. Megdal helped organize and moderated multiple symposium panels. Professor Jay Famiglietti of Arizona State University focused his opening keynote on “Observing Groundwater Depletion from
Space in the American Southwest” and Ron Rayner, who farms is Arizona and California and serves on the project’s Advisory Board, served on the panel addressing “NM, AZ and CA Stakeholder Perspectives on Barriers and Pathways to Sustainable Groundwater Use.” U of A Maricopa Agricultural Center personnel, Taylor Arp, Mercedes Martinez, Charles Stackpole, Trevor Pettit, and Debankur Sanyal, co-authored a poster on their research, “Alternative Cover Crop Management in the Desert: A Report from Arizona,” which was presented at the symposium by Sanya. Another research poster on “Evaluation of Crop Water Use, Growth, and Yield under Different Irrigation Rates and Methods with Amended and Non-amended Soil; Evaluating the Performance of OpenET Models for Alfalfa in Arizona” was presented by Diaa Eldin M. Elshikha, featuring her work with fellow U of A co-authors Said Attalah, Elsayed Ahmed Elsadek, Peter Waller, Douglas J. Hunsaker, Kelly R. Thorp, Eduardo Bautista, Clinton Williams, Gerard Wall, and Ethan Orr.
SBM email 2/5/25: It would be good to post this agenda along with the story, once out and with Debankur’s abstract added, to our ag project page.