Browsing by Author "Faulkner, Joshua W."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Climate Change Adaptation for Agriculture. Mitigating Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Climate on Crop Production
    Easton, Zachary M.; Faulkner, Joshua W. (Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2014-09-24)
    Climate change and climate variability pose a great risk to agricultural production and farm livelihoods, and producers will need to adapt to a changing climate that is expected to be significantly more variable in order to meet these challenges. Agricultural producers have a long record of successful adaptation to a host of internal and external pressures and have made remarkable strides in the face of these pressures.
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    Climate Change Adaptation for Agriculture: Mitigating Short and Long-Term Impacts of Climate on Crop Production
    Easton, Zachary M.; Faulkner, Joshua W. (Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2020)
    This publication outlines some of the climate related challenges facing agriculture and then proposes some steps to mitigate and adapt to these challenges
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    Communicating Climate Change to Agricultural Audiences
    Easton, Zachary M.; Faulkner, Joshua W. (Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2016-11-15)
    Discusses climate change and challenges related to climate change, in relation to agriculture.
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    Watershed model parameter estimation in low data environments
    Garna, Roja K.; Fuka, Daniel R.; Faulkner, Joshua W.; Collick, Amy S.; Easton, Zachary M. (Elsevier, 2022-12)
    Study region: Three watersheds in the Lake Champlain Basin of Vermont, USA. Study focus: Watershed models are essential for evaluating the impact of watershed management; however, they contain many parameters that are not directly measurable. These parameters are commonly estimated by calibration against observed data, often streamflow. Unfortunately, many areas lack long-term streamflow records, making parameter estimation in low data environments (LDE) challenging. A new calibration technique, simultaneous multi-basin calibration (MBC), was developed to estimate model parameters in LDE. Three Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model initializations for USGS gages with ~ 2-year records in the Lake Champlain Basin of Vermont, USA, were evaluated by comparing MBC and the commonly used similarity-based regionalization (SBR) approach, where calibrated parameters from a watershed with an extended data record are transferred to the LDE receptor watersheds. In MBC, each watershed is initialized, and observed flows from each initialization are aggregated to generate a combined streamflow record of sufficient length to calibrate using a differential evolution algorithm. New hydrological insights for the region: Using this new MBC method, we demonstrate improved model performance and more realistic model parameter values. This study demonstrates that short periods of hydrological measurement from multiple locations in a basin can represent a system similarly to long term measurements and that even short records taken at multiple locations significantly improve our hydrologic knowledge of a system as compared to relying on the similarity of a basin with a long record of flow. In addition, this study revealed that the hydrologic response is mediated by the interplay of very low soil-saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) and cracking soils. As a result, even if Ksat is very low, cracking clays have a large impact on runoff production Garna et al. (2022).