Co-designed farming scenarios show that vegetation is more effective than drainage regulating water excess in the inner Argentinean Pampas
Study region: La Picasa endorheic basin (6 820 km²), Inner Argentine Pampas, one of South America’s most productive rain-fed plains. Study focus: We evaluated how land-use change, rainfall variability and drainage infrastructure control shallow-groundwater behaviour in ultra-flat landscapes. The So...
| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Formato: | info:ar-repo/semantics/artículo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Elsevier
2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12123/24075 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214581825006408 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2025.102811 |
| Sumario: | Study region: La Picasa endorheic basin (6 820 km²), Inner Argentine Pampas, one of South America’s most productive rain-fed plains.
Study focus: We evaluated how land-use change, rainfall variability and drainage infrastructure control shallow-groundwater behaviour in ultra-flat landscapes. The Soil Water Balance (SWB) crop model was linked to the iMOD groundwater model through a one-way coupling to simulate daily water-table dynamics (2009–2019) under four stakeholder-defined scenarios: current practice (E0), agricultural intensification (E1), pasture intensification with + 20 % perennial cover (E2) and a six-fold drainage-network expansion (E3).
New hydrological insights for the region
Pasture intensification deepened the median water table by ∼0.9 m and halved the area with depths < 1 m, outperforming intensified cropping (–0.3 m) and extensive drainage (negligible basin-wide effect). Drainage channels acted only as local, short-term buffers during extreme floods. Inter-annual rainfall variability remained the dominant driver of groundwater fluctuations, yet adaptive land-use mixes can increase storage ahead of wet periods. Results indicate that nature-based vegetation strategies are more effective and sustainable than additional “grey” infrastructure for regulating water excess in the Inner Pampas and similar dry-plain agro-ecosystems. |
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