Climate change impacts on agriculture dominated Canadian watershed

Abstract

Agricultural water management plays a vital role in the food production and food security(Abbaspour, et al. 2007).Improper management of agriculture leads to local or far field water quality.Runoff from an agriculture land is considerably enriched with different kinds of nutrients, sediments, and pesticides. Nutrient loadings carried with the runoff has caused eutrophication to various degrees and scales, from small and large bays around the Great Lakes (e.g., Green Bay in Lake Michigan) to wide-scale eutrophication in some of the Great Lakes themselves (e.g., Lake Erie)(Inamdar, S.  and Naumov, A. 2006)..Water quality and watershed management programs are highly benefitted from simulation models since the advent of computer-based watershed models( Daggupati et al. 2018). To this extent, present study used Soil and Water assessment Tool (SWAT) to investigate the climate change impacts on nutrient loadings primarily occur from runoff from a Canadian agriculture dominated watershed. We found that non-point source pollutants especially total N and total P originating from agriculture land is decreasing during mid and late century projections. Streamflow during winter and fall is projected to increase compared to historical period.

Keywords: SWAT modeling, climate change impact, non-point source pollution