Infographic: Agricultural Groundwater Replenishment with BasinScout

The Freshwater Trust has received two Conservation Innovation Grants (CIGs), as well as support from California Proposition 1 funding through partner organizations, to apply our BasinScout toolkit to groundwater issues. The goal is to support the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in the Solano Subbasin, a medium-priority groundwater basin where groundwater demand is largely dominated by agriculture. The basin’s history of conjunctive use and management, combined with the recent formation of several groundwater sustainability agencies, makes it primed for innovative decision-making support tools such as BasinScout.

BasinScout uses an educational approach that shows individual producers how their agricultural practices can be optimized to reduce water demand as well as reduce runoff. BasinScout also demonstrates how some management practices, such as cover-cropping, can actually increase stormwater infiltration in order to replenish groundwater.

BasinScout can be used for agriculturally dominated landscapes as a means to visualize, optimize, and track how land and water management can influence the near-surface aquifer (10 to 30 meters below ground surface) on an individual field level for entire watersheds or groundwater basins. The tool provides landowners and decision makers with a more encompassing understanding of the interactions between management decisions and the ramifications for groundwater supplies.

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