Aquaculture and Irrigation Water Use Model 2.0 Software

The Mississippi Alluvial Plain (MAP) is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the US and extracts more than 11 km3/year for irrigation activities. The heavy drivers of groundwater use are aquaculture and crops, which include rice, cotton, corn, and soybeans (Wilson, 2021). Consequently, groundwater-level declines in the MAP region (Clark and others, 2011) pose a substantial challenge to water sustainability, and hence, we need reliable groundwater pumping monitoring solutions to manage this resource appropriately. In this study, we incorporate remote sensing datasets and a Distributed Random Forests machine learning model to improve upon previous water use estimates and develop the Aquaculture and Irrigation Water Use Model (AIWUM) 2.0. Annual and monthly groundwater use from 2014 to 2020 are predicted at a 1 km resolution. This work advances our ability to predict groundwater use in regions with scarce or limited in-situ groundwater withdrawal availability.