Month: February 2017

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eNews February 2017

NMSU Grad Student Studying Economic Impact of Water Conservation, Storage Capacity Development, and Crop Diversity in the Tucumcari Project of East-Central New Mexico (continued)

A dynamic optimization framework will be used to formulate the model study. Three water policy measures to be considered include: lining canals, removing stored sediment, and expanding irrigation storage capacity. Three water supply scenarios will also be considered, namely normal, dry, and drought. The model will examine the economic consequences to farm income resulting from each of these nine combinations of water supply and policy. The governing equations of the model will accept inputs regarding water availability factors and the economies of crop production and pricing as well as the choice of recreational versus irrigation use of water.

Befekadu Habteyes received a 2017 NM WRRI Student Water Research Grant for this project. The research results will be posted on the institute’s website and made available to the AHCD. They may implement the techniques and policy recommendations from this research to support the growers in the district and county as a whole. Moreover, the ongoing research for better domestic water supply in the Northeast counties of New Mexico could use this approach to find more efficient and cost effective ways of using scarce water resources. The Agricultural Science Center at Tucamcari might also use this research as a guide to identify the economic feasibility and release schedules for new forage crops for the ranchers in the district.

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eNews February 2017

Recipient of NM WRRI Student Water Research Grant Studying Effect of Tree Canopy Cover on Discharge of Upper Gallinas Watershed in New Mexico (continued)

The Gallinas River is a tributary of the Pecos River System in northern New Mexico, yielding an average of 3,100 acre-feet of water annually. The upper Gallinas watershed is located approximately 20 miles northwest of Las Vegas, NM and covers approximately 52,500 acres. Historical high resolution aerial photography of this region has been purchased from the Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC). These images are available only in a non-georeferenced format. Therefore, a widely used image processing software system called ERDAS Imagine is being used to georeference the images so they can be used in other geographic information system programs. Another software package, eCognition Developer, is also being used to assist in the proper classification of image features.

Water discharge and precipitation data for the watershed have been obtained from a local gauging station and weather station near Las Vegas, NM. The tree canopy cover, water discharge, and precipitation data are being analyzed for possible correlations, and therefore possible cause and effect relationships, using a standard regression analysis software package (RStudio). Preliminary results concerning canopy coverage only suggest a sharp increase from the 1930s to 2014, likely due to reduced logging and grazing, fire suppression, and different land management practices over that time interval. It is expected that further analyses of this kind will lead to more useful insights to inform water management policies in the future.

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