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Water quality impairment from fertilizer runoff remains a major source of urban-agricultural conflicts when it leads to serious health risks. In this paper, we analyze the role of watershed organizations in Iowa, USA, that include both agricultural and urban stakeholders to address water quality challenges. We conducted three focus group discussions with 14 coordinators representing these watershed organizations to analyze what policy tools these organizations are using to address urban-agricultural conflicts and what outcomes have resulted from their efforts. We used qualitative coding to apply an existing set of policy tools already established in the literature. Coordinators' responses showed that who participates in these organizations has a major impact on the level of problem solving. There were limited instances of joint urban-agricultural engagement strategies, but these were promising in changing individual's perspectives and indicate that strategic targeting of watershed participants may be crucial to overcoming conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate solutions related to mitigation and adaptation vary across the United States and India, given their unique current socio-political–technological abilities and their histories. Here, we discuss results from online face-to-face interviews undertaken with 33 U.S.-based climate experts and 30 India-based climate experts. Using qualitative grounded theory, we explore open-ended responses to questions related to mitigation and adaptation and find the following: (1) there is broad agreement among experts in both countries on the main mitigation solutions focused on the decarbonization of energy systems, but (2) there are a diversity of views between experts on what to prioritize and how to achieve it. Similarly, there is substantial agreement that adaptation solutions are needed to address agriculture, water management, and infrastructure, but there is a wide variety of perspectives on other priorities and how best to proceed. Experts across both countries generally perceived mitigation as needing national policies to succeed, while adaptation is perceived as more local and challenging given the larger number of stakeholders involved in planning and implementation. Our findings indicate that experts agree on the goals of decarbonization, but there was no consensus on how best to accomplish implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative governance has been promoted for decades as a means to tackle complex water management problems worldwide. Yet, watershed based efforts often lack interdependent consequences that can motivate participation, given upstream–downstream asymmetries. Additionally, watershed collaborations often have limited legal authority to take action, which can be due to political conflicts. While local governments often participate in collaborations, few studies have examined their motivations or how local governments could use existing legal authority to enact projects or change policies. This paper focuses on four cases in Iowa, USA, where local governments self‐organized to form watershed management authorities and undertake collaborative planning and management. We conduct a qualitative study to examine why local governments participate in collaborative governance and how they use their existing legal authorities. We found that local governments participated primarily to leverage external funding opportunities, while the advantage of multijurisdictional collaboration to reduce flooding and water quality was important but secondary. Using legal authorities to form agreements occurred in two cases to address flooding, but in all four cases collaboratives largely avoided water quality because of political tensions. We discuss the implications for how local governments might address the challenges of generating commitments and issues of legitimacy to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cover crops are an increasingly popular practice to improve agroecosystem resilience to climate change, pests, and other stressors. Despite their importance for climate mitigation and soil health, there remains an urgent need for methods that link winter cover crops with regional-scale climate mitigation and adaptation potential. Remote sensing is ideally suited to provide these linkages, yet, cover cropping has not been analyzed extensively in remote sensing research. Methods used for remote sensing of crops from satellites traditionally leverage the difference between visible and near-infrared reflectance to isolate the signal of photosynthetically active vegetation. However, using traditional greenness indices like the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for remotely sensing winter vegetation, such as winter cover crops, is challenging because vegetation reflectance signals are often confounded with reflectance of bare soil and crop residues. Here, we present new and established methods of detecting winter cover crops using remote sensing observations. We find that remote sensing methods that incorporate thermal data in addition to traditional reflectance metrics are best able to distinguish between winter farm management practices. We conclude by addressing the potential of existing and upcoming hyperspectral and thermal missions to further assess agroecosystem function in the context of global change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A plurality of basins improved water quality under a shared nutrient cap. • Basins had similar Theil-Sen trends across seasons despite different flood risks. • Basin management played an important but inconsistent role in UAL and P:R outcomes. • Soil types and drainage BMPs were not major factors in UAL and P:R trends. • Mann-Kendall trends indicate that further improvements are possible. Water quality degradation from agricultural runoff remains a pressing problem worldwide. A major challenge for restoring water quality is the need for long-term evaluation of governance and management interventions. In agricultural contexts, the primary interventions are best management practices designed to minimize nutrient losses by reducing fertilizer application, soil erosion, and drainage. Most studies are undertaken over short time scales or a few farms, which makes it difficult to connect management to water quality outcomes at larger scales. This paper addresses these gaps by examining 22 years of water quality trends at monthly time scales across the entirety of the 166 small, artificial drainage basins in the Everglades Agricultural Area, the sugarcane-growing region of Florida, USA. The Everglades Forever Act mandated the adoption of best management practices to reduce phosphorus loads but devolved implementation to farms collectively rather than requiring individual compliance. We examined the effect of biophysical and management drivers on long-term trends for two outcomes: a ratio of pumping-to-rainfall, which measures drainage decisions, and total phosphorus load per acre. We analyzed the magnitude and consistency of observed trends using Theil-Sen and Mann-Kendall analysis respectively across wet and dry seasons. Statistically significant downward trends were more common for decreases in magnitude than in consistency for both variables, indicating important management shifts have occurred but that some have not been continually improved over time. However, we also found statistically significant upward trends in a small number of basins for both variables. These results suggest that devolving management to farms has led to a widespread shift in management but that incentives for ongoing improvement would be valuable. Findings on biophysical and management drivers were limited, indicating that more fine-grain data may be needed to better detect their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]