website logo image homepage link
website logo image homepage link

RESEARCH / FIELD CATCHMENT SITES: REDUCING NITROGEN LOADING

Image for Field Catchment Sites: Reducing Nitrogen Loading

Field Catchment Sites: Reducing Nitrogen Loading

Bradley Kennedy and Gurpal Toor will be using three edge-of-field catchment sites located across Maryland for their research: one with tile drainage, one with ditch drainage, and one measuring surface runoff. These catchments are all in corn-soybean rotations with winter cover crops. Each site is instrumented with an H-flume or water control structures to measure flow and collect runoff samples. Runoff samples will be collected year-round and analyzed for different forms of nitrogen. The team is also testing novel spectrometer technology that can continuously monitor nitrate in ditch and tile water. The near-term goal is to determine what could be done on agricultural lands to reduce nitrogen loading by 20 percent.

Project Leader


Gurpal Toor

Professor and Extension Specialist, University of Maryland

Link to bio

Project Team


Bradley Kennedy

PhD Student, Department of Environmental Science & Technology, University of Maryland

Linkedin