Groundwater Sustainability

Principal Investigator: Amina Naliaka

I study how farmers’ decisions and groundwater systems shape each other, and what that means for keeping irrigated agriculture sustainable under a changing climate. My dissertation focuses on the Central Platte region of Nebraska. It combines hydrological modeling (SWAT and MODFLOW) with surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand why farmers adopt or reject water conservation practices, and how those choices affect water availability.

My current work includes estimating the water footprint of crop production, analyzing the trade-offs of winter cover crops, and building a socio-hydrology framework that connects farmer behavior to water scarcity. This research is supported by a grant from the North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NCR-SARE) program.

I also teach and mentor. I have designed and taught GIS tutorials and courses, mentored students at several levels, and led STEM outreach to bring young people into the geospatial sciences. Across all of this, I aim to produce research that farmers, water managers, and policymakers can actually use.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Ruopu Li

Dr. Li is an Associate Professor in Geography and Environmental Resources. His research is focused on the interdisciplinary research agenda on food, energy, water, and their dependent social systems. His research methods and tools involve hydrologic modeling, land use and cover change, social-technical systems for rural development, and geospatial artificial intelligence. As a productive researcher, he has received over 10 research grants from federal, state and regional agencies, and published over 30 publications and a book in the past five years. In particular, he has received two grants from Nebraska Department of Natural Resources and CPNRD respectively.

Other Collaborators

Yao Hu, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography & Spatial Sciences and Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware. His role in the project is to provide guidance on the development of an agent-based models, as well as integrated model coupling, for representing the interactions between human and water systems.
Gengxin Ou, Computational Hydrologist and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His role in the project is to provide guidance on the hydrologic data management and model integration.
Jessica Crowe, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her role in the project is to provide expert guidance on survey research instrument development and data collection.
Robert Zabawa, PhD – Research Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Tuskegee University, Alabama. His role in the project is to provide expert guidance on the development of research instruments as well as guidance on outreach activities.
Central Platte Natural Resources District (CPNRD). This organization serves as a liaison between the team and the stakeholders and helps facilitate opportunities for engagement during stakeholder meetings hosted by CPNRD.

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