Illinois Mobile App Master Calendar

Abstract
Agriculture occupies approximately 40% of the Earth’s land surface and accounts for over 70% of global freshwater consumption, remaining a primary driver of water pollution. Enhancing soil, water, and nutrient conservation is critical for improving soil health, reducing the agricultural water footprint, and restoring ecosystems while sustaining global food production. This presentation details our recent efforts to decipher nutrient transport dynamics using data science and artificial intelligence to develop data-driven, knowledge-guided conservation prioritization solutions, with a specific focus on nitrogen loss in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). Our research reveals that transport efficiency outweighs nitrogen surplus in governing riverine nitrate export; specifically, hydrological variability and increased precipitation play dominant roles in accelerating nitrate transport from fields to streams. By implementing a watershed-typology-based, integrated biophysical-economic framework, we demonstrate that targeted conservation, informed by the dynamic relationship between nitrogen surplus and export, significantly improves the cost-effectiveness of nitrogen loss reduction across the UMRB. These findings provide a foundation for informing state and federal nutrient loss reduction policies and guiding the effective implementation of environmental stewardship programs on the ground.

Bio
Dr. Bin Peng is an Assistant Professor on agricultural hydrology and water quality in the Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is dedicated to unraveling the multi-scale complexities of water, nutrient, and carbon cycles over diverse managed landscapes and their interconnectedness with integrated terrestrial-aquatic environmental sustainability and the broad Earth system. To tackle these challenges, Dr. Peng uses various tools and methods in his research, including field measurement, computational modeling, big geospatial data, and AI for environmental science. He is now leading the Water, Agriculture, and Conservation Innovation (WACI) research and extension program focusing on micro- to macro-scale water, nutrient, and carbon dynamics over managed landscape. Beyond his research, Dr. Peng is actively engaged with the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy and the Federal Hypoxia Task Force.