ABSTRACT
Irrigation hydrology is at the nexus of water-energy-food security and is a key element of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) from the local to regional and in some cases transnational scales across the world. Designation of water as a tradable commodity separate from its landscape of origin when combined with market-driven agricultural systems has led to and will likely continue to provoke issues of water and food security locally to regionally. Viewing irrigated agriculture as distinct from the regional landscape ecosystem of which it is a part has likely led to several counter-intuitive unintended consequences associated with water scarcity and lack of food security in communities largely dependent on irrigated agriculture. Consideration of the landscape ecosystem as a whole within which water is an integral part and essential element critical toward meeting the basic needs of habitats and communities together with agricultural production likely will require reconsideration of the basic underpinnings of what water is to society. Irrigated agriculture has already altered the basin considered and perhaps adjoining basins’ hydrologic systems, landscape restoration takes on different meaning that is associated with developing sustainability and resilience within the habitat, human community and agricultural sectors. Generally, the redefinition of water requires government intervention within the basins affected, preferably working with the primary stakeholders to develop the water management sustainability plans and actions that are pro-active in providing robust broadly applied IWRM within the context of the socio-hydrologic system. Such IWRM will likely require a careful determination of deep percolation or groundwater recharge rates/volumes and when they reach the aquifers critical to the landscape hydrology. Estimates that rely on soil texture may not be adequate and direct field measurements of recharge rates, or volumes may be required to adequately address IWRM within regions that are groundwater-dependent for agricultural and domestic water use. Stakeholders associated with irrigated agriculture working with the local communities and wildlife managers will play a critical role in developing possible system trajectories that help anticipate undesirable exceedance of key socio-hydrologic thresholds as the regions develop sustainability plans.
