CROP AND FORAGE HEALTH ON DISSECTED TERRACES IN QUAPAW TRIBAL LANDS: IMPLICATIONS OF EROSION ON MARGINAL LANDSCAPES

APPLICANT CAPABILITIES ENHANCEMENTThe PI will utilize this 1-year sabbatical to hone remote sensing techniques, broaden experienceswith the utilization of vegetative indices, and develop ground reference methods regarding erodedlandscapes and crop health. Spending a year with experts on well characterized study sites willprovide him with the skills needed to adapt these methods to his current and ongoing Blue WaterFarms program in western Kentucky where erosion is actively being observed (Figure 1 and 2).FUTURE RESEARCH GOALS POST-SABBATICALFuture goals post-sabbatical include incorporating these remote sensing techniques into the BlueWater Farms network workflow on ten of our actively eroding, monitored watersheds. Thesetechniques will not only help us quantify the infield erosion and the crop health changes associatedwith erosion that have occurred across these monitored watersheds, but also help us extrapolatethese results from intensively monitored areas to the larger field landscape scale. Theseobservations will be shared with participating growers, commodity boards, and countyCooperative Extension Service agents with the expectation that farm managers will recognizeerosion as having a negative impact on crop health as well as a resource loss, leading to theadoption of conservation BMPs and/or management strategies that will protect the long-termsustainability of their farms, the agricultural community, and the environment. Preliminary datafrom this future work will be used to develop a USDA AFRI Integrated Research/Extensionproposal to expand our existing Blue Water Farms network into forage operations in westernKentucky.