Laura Bates

Research interests: watershed management, stream ecology, biological indicators, nutrients, water quality, limnology

Current project: As part of a multi-scale and regional management project across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio, my work aims to characterize frozen and partially-frozen soil hydrologic and nutrient cycling processes on privately owned farm fields with different management, climate, soil and landscape conditions. Our goal is to understand how management affects wintertime edge-of-field runoff and nutrient losses, and how they vary across climate gradients.

Why this matters: Transitions between soil freeze-thaw cycles and shorter growing seasons in cold regions like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio can present challenges that influence agroecosystem management, physiochemical processes, and water quality in receiving streams and rivers. Increasing global populations adds pressure for agricultural crop production, which often contributes to the degradation of aquatic ecosystems with increased runoff and nutrient loading. In order to minimize runoff and nutrient losses while also optimizing crop production, it is important to understand hydrologic dynamics on farm fields in winter ‘non-growing’ seasons as well as summer ‘growing’ seasons.