 My name is Malika Noko, and I received a SAIR grant for my graduate research. I'm working on a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my degree program is through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the actual program is in Environment and Resources. So we are standing in the Wisconsin Central Sands, and here's my map of Wisconsin, and it's in the center of the state, and it is a region that is characterized by the sandy soils. The sandy soils were caused by the movement of the glaciers and like a catastrophic draining event of the Glacial Lake, Wisconsin, and because of that, the soils, they don't hold a lot of water, they don't hold a lot of nutrients, and this is the prime region in Wisconsin where irrigated agriculture is taking place. And this is a potato field towards the end of its life, it'll actually be killed in about a week from now, so you can see it's already started to senesce on its own. And potatoes are one of the main irrigated crops in this region, and what I'm currently doing is looking at how irrigation at this scale, because it is a relatively large scale in a concentrated region, it's thousands of high capacity wells in this area, and there have been in the past 10 years or so some surface water stress of the streams and the lakes in this region, and there's a lot of high quality trout streams, so basically there's a conservation community dilemma here. People are upset and people are upset about water, so the positive part of that is people are interested in managing water, so really I have, I would say, a few main goals of my PhD, one is to just try to understand and characterize the water budget from these irrigated agro-ecosystems, and I'm using a few different approaches to do that, and what the SAIR grant has helped me to do is install this, which it's not super impressive because you cannot see what's underground, but it's a passive capillary wick lysimeter, so you just have to believe me that right in this region, about 8 feet underground, there's an instrument that measures drainage, vertical drainage, and that is a very challenging thing to measure, and as you can imagine it was a very challenging thing to install, and it has about a 10-inch diameter, and there are 25 of them in different crop, in six different cropping systems on this farm, and so that is capturing drainage, and then we have several meteorological stations that are capturing met variables, I don't think you can't see any of the full met stations right now, and we have stratified soil moisture and temperature probes all the way up, so basically we're measuring everything we can, including precipitation and irrigation, to back into evapotranspiration, which is the main issue at hand, is the hypothesis is irrigated agriculture is increasing consumptive groundwater use because we are irrigating the plants until they don't need any more water, so they can transpire at the highest rates possible, and it's just a challenge to measure evapotranspiration, so that's kind of step one, and I'm basically trying to, the lysimeters are one of three ways that I'm trying to characterize evapotranspiration, and then the drainage is considered potential groundwater recharge, so that's the other part that I'm working on, you can kind of see if you look across, there are these white, these white sensors on a post, do you kind of see the line of them? So that's like a, it's a temperature and relative humidity transect across this field, and it kind of gets at the second area that I'm focusing my work on, which is what is the relationship between irrigated agriculture and regional climate? We know from data and studies out west where it is very arid that these concentrated regions of irrigated agriculture can actually shift climate patterns through irrigated cooling, so you can have warmer nights and cooler days in these regions, so we're curious, everyone's always said it's too humid for that to happen in the Midwest, so we're testing that hypothesis both at the local scale, so what this transect is measuring is when the actual center pivot goes over it, what is the temperature decline and the relative humidity rise associated with that, and that's one of those things that if we can understand that effect, we can build better models. I also have a similar transect that is at a larger regional scale, so every two kilometers through the the the fattest portion of the central sands that's irrigated, I have one of these sensors to look at how this is manifesting at you know that regional scale, so like this is more of a mechanistic understanding, and that's just to see, you know, more of a proof of concept as to if we're seeing this in the region, so that's that's the other part major part of my work, so really I'm trying to measure what I can measure and then build better models that's that's really the next the next step, so that's what I'm working on and I thank you all for your funding and I really appreciate it and hopefully I will have some very you know interesting results to report. So there's a reservoir that sits at about 8 feet below the surface and that that collects the drainage water and because the soil is so sandy we make an assumption that all of the flow is vertical that's a any the physicists maybe know that that is a huge assumption to make because you know any soil scientists will tell you that there's lateral flow that happens in the soil, but the soil in this case is so sandy that it's fairly safe to make that assumption, however the point at which we are collecting drainage it basically has this fiberglass wick material that maintains like a constant soil water tension or potential that keeps it so that that spot is equivalent to about field capacity for a sand, so you're collecting drainage at about field capacity, so I'm gonna pump out the drainage hopefully we've got some. Alright, there it is.