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let's go ahead and get started uh thank you everyone for joining us for today's montana institute on ecosystems rough cut seminar series um before i introduce our speaker for today i'm just going to go through a couple of housekeeping items um and then i'll introduce wyatt we'll go from there so the first housekeeping item is just to make sure you'll notice that you were muted upon entering the seminar um and just make sure that you keep your mics muted throughout so we're not getting any noise interference um the second housekeeping item is just related to q and a so we're going to hold all questions until the end of the seminar but if anything does come up while wyatt is presenting please feel free to enter that into the chat and then i can moderate and make sure that he receives that question but at the end you can also unmute and ask the question yourself at that point and the final housekeeping item that i have is we are recording today's seminar and so i will just link to where that will be posted on the ioe website in the chat um towards the end of today's seminar in case you know anyone that might want wasn't able to make it today or if you want to go back and view it at a later time so just making everyone aware of that so today we have joining us dr wyatt cross i'm very excited about hearing about this project um but dr cross is the director of the montana university system water center uscs funded water resource research institute the water center facilitates and conducts activities that advance understanding and stewardship of water resources across montana and also serves as the primary nexus between the montana university system and diverse water resources stakeholders including state and federal agencies ngos citizens and the private sector and dr cross is also an associate professor in the msu department of ecology with a research program focused on river ecosystems so with that introduction again very excited to have you here wyatt um presenting to us i will go ahead and turn it over to you awesome thanks so much um can you hear me you can hear me okay great everybody thanks for being here i really appreciate your time on this crazy crazy day um what i want to talk about today is evaluating irrigation efficiency this is a project that we've been working on at the montana water center for about a year and a half now and it's talking about irrigation in the context of building a sustainable water future for montana i want to acknowledge my co-authors first and most importantly whitney lonsdale who has done the lion's share of the work on this stuff chuck dalby at kindle enterprises in helena and anne schwenn and sarah malloy at the dnrc also in helmet so what i want to do today is advance the slide sometimes you have to like refresh there you go click it so what i want to do today is um is i'm going to talk very briefly about water generally and water scarcity and that'll help motivate kind of where irrigation and irrigation efficient efficiency fits into that picture of water scarcity but i want to spend most of the time talking about this product we've been working on in terms of understanding how changes in irrigation practice influence irrigation efficiency what are the consequences of that for water supply and other water users and what are some potential adaptation strategies we might might go forth with uh moving moving ahead in the future so uh water is everything right we depend on water to produce our food to power and supply our homes to fuel and cool our industries to to recreate in and also to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services that we care about but water as a resource is finite but you know unfortunately our demand for water is not so this is a recent paper in 2018 that basically estimated that over half of the human population face severe water scarcity at least during one month during the year and this is particularly true in arid regions of the world such as the western u.s and so as the population continues to grow and continues to redistribute these these the scarcity is just going to continue to kind of ramp up now water scarcity defined here is this region where our demand for water approaches or exceeds supply creates a massive amount of tension among these different demands for water and forces us to make really difficult decisions about how our water is partitioned in society and nature as well as how we deal with this from a management policy perspective now in the western u.s water scarcity isn't theoretical it's it's uh it's here this is a graph that shows changes in water availability and water use over time in the colorado river basin and you can see in the mid 90s here that demand for water exceeds started to exceed supply in a way that's basically not sustainable it's actually really rare for the colorado river to even make it to the gulf of california anymore so so it's a big deal and it's happening happening local this is becoming way more common across the west this is an interesting figure that shows depletion of river flows in the month of september and so basically what this is doing is comparing present day measurements of flow with modeled estimates of what flows would be like without water withdrawals and you can see very significant depletion in our rivers across the western west as our demand starts to outstrip supply this is telling us something um and i should mention that these levels of depletion 50 and higher uh are well beyond the threshold in which we know that biodiversity and natural ecosystem services uh become severely degraded now in our own backyard this is something that that surely affects us as well this is an example from the bozeman integrated water resources plan that basically predicts that demand for water in our in the gallatin valley particularly in the city of bozeman is likely to exceed supply in the next 10 to 20 years and with our current rates of population growth um by 2042 we're going to have a water deficit a water gap so we're going to be down about 6 600 acre feet per year and so as with many other locations across the west there's this kind of huge looming questions about where is this water gonna come from uh as well as you know how how will any conserved or saved water in the future might be distributed or how might that water be distributed among the various competing demands right so so how do we deal with water scarcity this is this is a really big deal how do we how do we tend to deal with it um in the 20th century we tended to deal with this by increasing our supply right so so focusing on the supply side of this equation so the bureau of reclamation the army corps of engineers and others constructed dams and large water projects that enabled us to continue to grow populations and grow food but in the 21st century this discussion has shifted big time to finding ways to reduce our demand for water and that's that's largely because of the huge economic and environmental costs of new storage projects as well as the the inherent vulnerability embedded in these engineered approaches and so so how do we reduce water demand what we need to do is we need to look at where most of the water use is occurring and figure out where we might have the best opportunities for water conservation so this is a graph from the usgs over i guess 1950 to 2015 showing the major water withdrawals by water sector um and you can see it's pretty obvious that they're two of these bars really stand out um the or sorry the yellow bar is is water withdrawal is used for thermoelectric power uh this is the the largest amount of water used in the us but uh it's not it's not that consumptive so so most of the water that cools thermoelectric plants actually goes back to the source and can be reused for other things irrigation is the second bar here in green and of course it's a huge user of water and a lot of the water used in irrigation is is consumptive so it passes through a plant gets evaporated or evapotranspired and it's lost from the local system okay so irrigation is is a big deal in terms of water use um in montana irrigation represents the largest consumptive piece of water this is from the montana state water plant and you can see that agricultural irrigation use consumption dwarfs things like thermal electric power plant cooling domestic uses industrial uses and so on and so this is important because you know how irrigation water is managed in montana will play a huge role in deciding our water future and the sustainability of water availability in montana for those of us in bozeman this is a little closer to home the upper missouri river basin this is just a pie graph showing the differences in consumptive water use among different sectors and again irrigation consumption is 82.2 percent of the total and although you know water savings or conservation in these other sectors like domestic uses and municipal use so on are important um irrigation is obviously our greatest opportunity for for conservation and so the question that's been asked for decades is you know how do we become more efficient in agricultural waters or essentially how do we squeeze more crops out of each drop in in the irrigation world this is typically referred to as efforts to to increase irrigation efficiency and we're defining it here is just the ratio of the total water consumed by crops to the total water that's diverted from the source from the river from the canal whatever and so the agricultural community has been very focused on increasing this ratio over time in efforts to to to conserve water how have they done this so since the mid 50s the most popular approach has been the modernization of irrigation infrastructure so so switching from say relatively inefficient flood irrigation to sprinkler irrigation and things like lining of ditches and canals basically all to get a higher proportion of the water that's diverted to directly fuel plant growth and perhaps even saving water by reducing the amount of water needs to be diverted from the source and there's been a huge amount of money and effort put into increasing irrigation efficiency this is a from february the bureau of reclamation has spent millions and millions of dollars on on helping water projects and farmers increase their irrigation efficiency and all these projects have the purported goal of essentially using less water uh to grow food now in the past several years there's been there's been much written about what's being called this paradox of irrigation efficiency and the fact that efforts to increase irrigation efficiency may not always reduce water consumption and there's a huge amount of uncertainty around this topic there there's very little consensus among water users anyone you talk to kind of has a different story about this um policymakers agencies and so on and so there's a lot of confusion about you know are these increases in efficiency actually saving water and this makes decisions about irrigation management and water conservation uh super super difficult so that's kind of the backdrop and those are the things that motivated us at the water center to try to help uh get a handle on this question in montana and so starting in march of 2019 we can be in a technical working group where we brought together a big group of water stakeholders in the state to basically discuss and investigate this super super important topic in particular we wanted to try to consider all the various perspectives that influence irrigation practice with the goal of providing an unbiased synthesis that can be used by policy makers funding agencies management agencies and even producers on the ground to make decisions that match their particular goals or objectives i'm happy to say that we're get we're printing copies of this right now actually and so we should have copies of this available really soon and a web presence in the next month or so so look out for copies of this product um okay so now to carry out this this technical working group we did a variety of things we had online webinars about various topics we had focused technical meetings for example one on hydrology we had broad participatory meetings getting input from all these different stakeholders we gave public talks and outreach and then we interviewed stakeholders in particular we interviewed irrigators on the ground to sort of ground truth you know what we were talking about resonates with them um and so we brought a whole bunch of people from different backgrounds different perspectives together to have a productive productive discussion about these things and so what i want to do now is spend the rest of the time giving an overview of some of the things that we've learned in this process and so we're going to start by talking generally about irrigation in montana and why this topic of whether changes in irrigation practice are really saving or conserving water is not very straightforward right so a little bit of background about about irrigation um you know irrigation has been huge in montana it's been a a big part of our identity our culture our livelihoods and our economy um since the mid 19th century and although irrigation is the largest water consumer in the state the the production of crops and grasses and so on contribute to this nearly five billion dollar agricultural industry so irrigation is hugely important in the state um but it's also had a a massive impact on on hydrology and on the landscape um and so this has happened through this this this huge network of conveyance infrastructure irrigated valleys ditches and canals that help spread water from rivers out onto the landscape and deliver that water to farms this is an image here zoomed in of the gallatin valley and you can see i mean it's just an absolute spider web of water infrastructure to feed feed farms now what's interesting is that you know much of the irrigation water that's spread out across the landscape doesn't ever make it to plant um but it seeps into the groundwater in these alluvial floodplains this is an example from the bitterroot valley here and you can see that the little circles all around here are showing a variety of wetlands in the right in the valley that have been created by leaky and inefficient flood irrigation and of course these wetlands now uh support support things like birds and other wildlife now over time we've also seen a lot of development in these floodplains each of these little points on this graph is a well for for a home or a small development and so now this incidental recharge from irrigation seeps into the aquifer supports an increasing amount of domestic use as well in addition these vast sort of floodplain sponges water sponges they basically they slow water down and allow it to slowly leak back into surface waters as something that we call return flows and you can see that here for flint creek this hatched area our return flows that are coming back late in the summer and so so that that slow leaking of water can can fuel river flow later in the summer fall and winter and that's important because those return flows can serve other purposes right so um those return flows can be really important for downstream irrigators for uh supporting recreational fisheries uh as well as supporting native ecos native fishes and ecosystems that that we care about and so it's it's complex we're in a weird place where it's sort of a brave new irrigated world that we've created over the past 150 years um but our irrigated valleys really represent novel hydroscapes right there's lots of leaky irrigation that's influencing the hydrology in ways that we've become very accustomed to but changes are taking place okay so so what we're seeing over the past say 50 years or so but more so in the last 30 or 40 years is a change in the way that we're applying water to farms okay in the context of trying to increase irrigation efficiency this is the graph that shows summarized data for about 17 western states of which montana's won and you can see that the blue line here shows total water use has not changed much at all over this particular time period but you can see gravity irrigation water use going down that's the classical flood irrigation and then pressure irrigation water use goin up this is hand line sprinklers or center pivot sprinklers okay so the way that water is being applied has changed a lot across the western u.s in montana so these are data that chuck dalby one of the authors helped us collate on acres converted to sprinkler irrigation so this just shows the total number of acres converted to sprinklers or center pivot by the major watersheds in montana and and the big picture here is that about 20 of flood irrigated land in montana has been converted to sprinkler irrigation and although we don't have the numbers here there's been also been a significant amount of mining of canals now i want to point out that there are obvious reasons for wanting to make these changes right um that all make good sense so so modernizing irrigation is reducing the cost but more importantly the amount of labor necessary it's helping farmers increase their crop production it can help improve water quality in some cases there's also been financial incentive programs from the state and federal state federal agencies that have helped farmers afford to do this switch and finally there's this perception that changes will lead to more crop per drop and savings that might be able to apply to be applied elsewhere but of course these changes are having a large influence on the hydrology of these irrigated valleys we've become relatively accustomed to and you know probably one of the most consequential these has to do with this connection between surface water and groundwater so when when producers are switching from flood to sprinkler irrigation um to increase their efficiency efficiency one of the most obvious responses is that less water is applied to the ground less of that water seeps beneath the soil profile and this means that the quantity that each farm has to divert is reduced right so the amount of water being diverted from the source typically declines the same thing tends to happen when canals and and ditches are lined so so less water seeps down underneath the ditch and therefore less water needs to be diverted for that canal to carry the same amount of water now it's often assumed therefore and and this is the key assumption in modernization projects that these changes reduce water loss and create water savings but it's really important to question whether these changes result in true water conservation from say a mass balance or a hydrologic perspective does increasing irrigation efficiency actually save water and the other question is here that we have to ask ourselves here is you know what was happening to that saved water before the changes in irrigation took place now just a cartoon here but in many cases this extra water was seeping into the vast alluvial river valleys the vast aquifers and eventually returning to stream flow where it may have been reused by downstream irrigators or perhaps it was benefiting fish other aquatic species or processes in this case of course the water wasn't really lost in the first place because it was being used or reused at other locations and at other times and you know when changes in irrigation and conveyance method take place it may not actually be saving water it might just be moving water temporally and spatially within the system so so maybe it's keeping it in stream at the time of diversion instead of spreading it out and having it returned to surface to surface water days weeks or months later and so the specific benefits or impacts of these changes on other water users is really going to depend on when and where water is needed in these other locations across the watershed but all this all this begs the question you know what actually constitutes real water savings and and from a from a mass balance perspective from a hydrology perspective water is only saved by reducing the amount that's removed from the system in question so i'm removed from a farm removed from a canal removed from a watershed by reducing evaporation rapidation from these things or reducing plant evapotranspiration and many of the changes associated with modernization of irrigation may not actually achieve these kinds of these kinds of water savings in fact an increasing number of studies suggest that modernization of irrigation infrastructure can actually lead to increased increased water consumption how can this happen well this can this can basically happen at the farm scale because you know more uniform and consistent sprinkler irrigation can lead to more robust and dense plant growth on farms sprinklers may also allow irrigation on lands that were previously unproductive under flood irrigation and at the watershed scale if we think at a broader scale water not diverted in one location can be used by other irrigators downstream so junior water right holders might be able to gain access to water they didn't have previously and so these changes to sprinkle irrigation aren't necessarily leading to true water conservation now there are many examples of this across the west but one that is relatively close to home is in the tongue river basin uh here where most of the headwaters are in wyoming the upper basin and then the rest of the watershed is downstream in montana prior to 2000 in this watershed there was a lot of conversion going on but most of it was happening uh in the upper part of the watershed in wyoming and what was happening is this was leading to increased crop consumption in wyoming and reduced return flows downstream and that seemed to be working okay for a while but came to a head during the drought between 2000 and 2006 when there were extreme water shortages there was a big drought and so during these drought years this basically led montana to file claims against wyoming supreme court basically stating that wyoming's conversion to sprinklers was increasing consumption and reducing these return flows that farmers were using downstream in montana in this particular case the supreme court ruled that the improvements in irrigation efficiency in wyoming were actually permissible under the yellowstone river compact and it remains the case today that changes to irrigation method so changing to sprinkler irrigation on the same acreage doesn't require state approval uh even if it might lead to increased consumption and this was something that was identified in our working group that's a super super critical area of policy that still deserves deserve some discussion okay so so in many cases irrigation efficiency leads to uh increased consumption and it can actually have effects on other water users in the system but in contrast you know in some places it's the case that the benefits of conversion so diverting less water and leaving more water in the stream at the time of diversion can outweigh the risks and potential impact of increased consumption and this is especially true uh in streams and rivers that have sections that are routinely dry in the late summer or where streams are say disconnected from from their main stem rivers right and so i want to give you an example of where where this has happened so this is an example from gold creek tributary to the clark fork river um and here's what here's what the deal was so prior to 2007 uh all the farmers in this watershed were flood irrigated and the issue was that large diversions for floods throughout the summer and early fall to feed second and third cuttings of grass we're leaving a lower proportion of gold creek that that lower section red there completely dewatered in most years and and this was basically severing the connectivity between gold creek and the clark fork and influencing the movement of trout from the carport up into gold creek and so this was having a pretty serious negative impact on on the trout fishery uh and after 2007 two of the larger ranches at the lower end of gold creek basically converted to sprinkler irrigation and what happened was this change reduced their necessary diversions during the summer and fall and essentially re-watered this lower section of gold creek this allowed trout to now spawn in this tributary and so improve the fishery to some degree and so this was a positive a positive outcome from switching to sprinkler irrigation now at the same time it's important to point this out that folks up high in the watershed maintained flood irrigation okay and this meant that there was a continued contribution of return flows from their flood irrigation downstream so so this is an example where the particular configuration of flood and sprinkler irrigation flood up high sprinkler down low actually helps to maintain stream flow and connectivity for the fishery at the lower end of the watershed throughout the year so and so i hope it's clear that from these two examples the impacts of changing conveyance methods on water supply are super site specific and each valley or local system is going to need to understand and assess the potential consequences of changes in in their irrigation practice and if we think about you know generalized changes to stream flow hydrographs in response to different types of irrigation we need to recognize that the shapes of these curves where they rise and decline throughout the year where things like return flows come do this bump and kind of come back to feeding stream flow this is really going to depend on characteristics of that particular location or watershed and the bottom line is we need more local data and monitoring to truly understand these changes and respond in an informed way these changes of course for the ecosystem are really consequential because many of the species that that live in these river ecosystems depend on the natural flow regime they depend on the natural temperature regime and on natural geomorphic processes that occur so so if one of our goals is to sustain natural river ecosystems we need to be well aware of these things and try to manage energy irrigation as best we can to support to support these ecosystem services okay um seems like i'm going faster than i expected but maybe that's good um i want to spend just the last part of the talk here uh focusing on some of the adaptation strategies that came up during our working group and i won't have time to discuss all the things that came up but i'm hoping you'll dig into this publication and read more about it it comes out if you're interested um and so given the complexities of irrigated agriculture and that it's not very straightforward how do we work towards a sustainable water future for montana and how do we do this while maintaining our working lands while maintaining natural river ecosystems and so on how do we balance all these various things the the first and probably the most fundamental recommendation that came out of our working group was that we need transparent monitoring and reporting of water use as well as state-of-the-art models to help us estimate water consumption and its influence on water supply you know not only would this help us protect water users and their rights in the future but it will provide the basic and essential data we need to play out different future scenarios and make informed decisions this is all very possible but it's going to require some investment from the state and some others we also need to update water budgets in the state so so we really we simply just can't manage what we don't quantify in the 70s the soil conservation service put out this water conservation salvage report where pretty rough water budgets were constructed for montana but it's certainly time to leverage new technology and expertise to provide a much more quantitative foundation for making decisions in the future so so data data data this is this is critical for any of the decisions we make in the future second another adaptation topic that was really key in our discussions was the idea of finding ways to support adaptive management of our alluvial river aquifers right and the idea here is basically to use our existing canal infrastructure our farm fields our floodplains and even constructing engineered structures to temporarily store water in the aquifer in the spring so that return flows can be used later in the season for farms for rivers and for other other uses i've got an interesting example of where this is a case study basically of where this is working and this is actually coming from idaho on the teton river it's a project called the teton river recharge project and essentially what was happening in the teton river valley was that in the 70s most of the producers converted from flood to sprinkler irrigation and this was a big deal it helped these farmers increase their crop production and things were going going swell but what they also noticed is that in the area there was a loss of wetlands and springs uh well levels were declining and there were reduced late summer stream flows and this was this was causing a lot of stress for the recreational fishing gods and for the ecosystem and so there was sort of this shared basically shared concern over what was happening to water in the teton river valley this all led to the formation of a group called the teton water users association and this project which was basically trying to find ways to maintain agricultural production while supporting in-stream flows for for the river ecosystem and basically the overall goal of this project is to slow down spring runoff store water in the alluvial aquifer and and try to increase summer stream flows later later in the season and so in a return to flood irrigation like management early in the spring folks on the ground here are now diverting water as soon as it's legally available and spreading it out through this reactivated canal system there's also some recharge taking place through these very focused infiltration galleries across the landscape but it's having a really significant effect on the system here so um this is a i think a really a win-win example so the canal system um that was once defunct once they switched to sprinkler is now back up and running and is providing aquifer recharge in the spring late season stream flows appear to be increasing and and the fishery appears to be hanging on there and doing doing okay importantly canal companies and irrigators are being paid for the aquifer recharge that's being provided by this practice and so this is i think a really interesting example of how agriculture and river ecosystems can both benefit if there's some thought put into the specific hydrology of the region and if you're interested in more about this these websites down here can guide you to some more information now in terms of supporting management of these aquifers another recommendation from our working group was was basically to identify and consider places where what we're calling hybrid irrigation management might help us accomplish local objectives and so again in this in this case on gold creek this particular configuration of flood and sprinkler irrigation allows ample water for producers to grow crops but also flows to support local fishery okay so so this is a case where if you know something about the hydrology and the configuration of the different types of irrigation in the landscape you can we can help manage the system to support multiple multiple demands and and the last thing i'll focus on here is uh this adaptive adaptation strategy which is basically um we need to enhance and and provide opportunities for true water conservation and so for the agricultural sector what this means is reducing unintended water consumption whether it's by reducing evaporation from from fields or canals or reducing unintended about the transpiration from crops this is this is going to be going to be really important in addition you know we need to make sure that changes to irrigation practice don't inadvertently increase water consumption and that's that's going to be a little more tricky to do secondly you know the adoption of drought tolerant or water use efficient crops is going to be really important moving forward uh and and this is this is possible so some plants like like lentils in montana for example are much more water yes efficient and drought tolerant um and so this is really these cases it's really possible to get more crop for drought essentially but this can be really difficult to do wi hout incentives that help producers navigate this change because it's um it's much easier to do what you've been doing for years right finally and there are many examples of this across the west water leasing programs or water banks can be developed which are have been very successful in the context of directing water that's conserved in agriculture to things like in-stream flows or sustainable development projects and when these transfers or these leases are done well they can help during times of water water scarcity to try to strike this balance between all the various multiple demands for water and doing so in a much more sustainable way and so so all these things will be increasingly important as we as we move forward um and i there's a lot i didn't focus on here just because of time but but i encourage you to look at the publication we're about to put out if you want more information about other ideas for for adaptation but i want to i want to finish up here with just a few a few take home points the first one is is that changes to irrigation practice have complex effects on hydrology and these are not easily generalized and so so we can't go on thinking that upgrades to infrastructure always save water and we need to shift our thinking towards a more nuanced understanding of these things based on local site-specific information second striking a balance among the different demands for water is certainly possible but it's going to require conversation and collaboration among water users agencies policy makers and so on to get this done it's also important to point out that it's probably going to require economic incentives to um for water rights holders who own the legal right to these this water third and finally i think it it's probably important for us to recognize that most of us want the same thing right we want to maintain our agricultural landscapes and livelihoods we want to sustain healthy streams and rivers we want to promote growth in our valleys that's smart and sustainable and water is really right smackdown at the center of this and so if we can work towards building a collective vision for our water future and basically trying to understand these things that that irrigated agriculture can play a super important role in mitigating mitigating water scarcity now i'm not going to let you get away with that one last point um and that is this the final thing i guess i want to say is that we can't ignore the fact that climate change is exacerbating water scarcity in the west so so when we're thinking about scarcity that might be driven by changes in agricultural practice or when we're thinking about scarcity that might be driven by population growth we've got to remember that the climate is playing a huge role in increasing our demand for water so co2 and warming increasing plant water use and plant growth as well as decreasing our supply of water by reducing snowpack by warming and increasing drought severity and so on and so and so the much bigger picture here is that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are absolutely critical in terms of helping us to secure our water future as well okay so the last thing i just want to say is i want to thank all the working group contributors that spent their time helping us understand this topic and were really generous with us so that we really really appreciate all these people i hope you can see them i know their names are small and our contact information is here and look out for our publication very soon in the next few days so thank you and i'd be happy to take questions wonderful thank you so much wyatt um yeah if i haven't seen any questions come through the chat during your talk but if folks you can either enter your questions in the chat and i can help moderate those or please feel free to unmute yourself um and you can ask quiet directly too i see um brian says he has a question brian would you like to unmute or yeah i think am i unmuted can you hear me man yeah awesome i think i i think i have a video but i'm not really sure because you can't see it this webex thing is a mystery given that university of montana doesn't use it it's just a bozeman thing anyway good good to see you wyatt great presentation thanks so much it was really polished and well thought out and and the flow and consistency of your message was great i kind of want to put you on the spot with a tough question uh if i might um i'm a huge fan of adaptive management i think adaptive management in a small um contained controllable situation is is a real benefit um um and and i'm curious given the context of western water giving the context of prior appropriation administration in montana specifically how do we incentivize farm scale to regional scale adaptive management programs and so i'm thinking it not only incentivized um producers to engage in it but also incentivize our agencies and our bigger funders to monitor it because we all know that one of the big downfalls and pitfalls of adaptive management is just the long-term commitment of buying into that monitoring program and looking at that data so i'm super curious if you've got some wonderfully bright ideas around incentivizing adaptive management programs oh yeah i mean i think i think incentivizing the agricultural community to be involved in that is huge and now i'm not answering your question no um i think that you know there's gotta be there there has to be they have to be involved right from the get-go right you can't come to the agriculture community and say hey we've figured out what the deal is with the water we're going to work it out just don't worry about it do this do that so i think i think bringing them in like right in the beginning in terms of adaptive management but also like you know they've got to be incentivized it's got to make sense to them right if you're trying to incentivize farmers in in gold creek montana to support you know farmers in in washington it's going to be that's going to be a tough sell so i think that uh making it relevant locally is really important um yeah i mean adaptive management i think that you know one of the biggest things that we're going to face is this is changes in land use right and so switching to these homes in these valleys or like in the gallatin valley large amount of development and that i think is going to require um entities that are neutral bodies like like water banks right or water leasing entities that that serve as a sort of middle middle ground for helping helping adaptively manage valleys because it's really complicated so you need someone thinking about all these different demands at the same time we need water in the galaxy for the fishery we need some water for the development that's occurring you know et cetera so you need you need think tanks and people and scientists to sort of set the stage but you want to bring everyone in at the ground floor so that they're bought in and now i'm just starting to battle so um but i think that's i think that's all true thanks wyatt i appreciate it um we had a question come in from james in the chat and he asks what was the court case in eastern montana yeah so this was um i don't i could get you in this in our document i have the actual number but um it was montana versus wyoming hi james uh supreme court and um it's all documented and i can i can get you that information if you want cool thanks wyatt okay all right this is bruce i have a question um and it's it's similar to what brian was saying and that i too i'm a fan of adaptive management but i think that what's crucial about adaptive management is local information and as you indicated before um that that one size doesn't fit all or one rule of thumb doesn't fit all um that we really have to examine um hydrology unit by unit uh kind of how how these systems work and and uh how to make them perform the best for us and still maintain their their services all safe um do you think that the question then is is montana uh equipped properly equipped uh are can you comment on what um what kind of instrumentation we might need in order to really do this adequately or maybe we are there no i mean we're definitely not there that's a great question um we're not there we um there's some investment in the state in terms of water uh but not enough i mean there there's investment in the montana bureau of mines and geology to do specific studies on on on water um and there's other examples of that but i think in any of our river valleys we don't have a comprehensive understanding of the hydrology um at these kinds of scales right and that's a huge deal in some states they've they've invested massive amounts of money into setting that groundwork so so okay information is the base we have to measure and monitor everything we need models that will help us do these future scenarios and so on and then when they if those are trustworthy and that's the key like developing these they have to be developed in a way that folks in the state trust these things um then they're it's really super effective i don't think we're there yet um but but we need to be you know and that's so it's a matter of sort of um convincing folks in the state that this is this is one of our most important challenges and so um getting the legislator to pass legislature to pass a bill or something that um allows us the resources to build a sort of montana water observatory or something right where you have universities agencies uh firms others working together to build that base of information because i mean adaptive management you you start with a hypothesis and you know you gotta understand your baseline make a change and then loop back and you can't do that without the information so that is a good question it's a hard it's a hard challenge yeah thanks awesome i was just looking um a couple of comments in the chat um one from sarah as a follow-up to brian's question she said i'd also add that educating agencies and policy makers to modify funding mechanisms programs and priorities to support hybrid irrigation management where it makes sense for example will be key um and then brian falcon consistent engagement across our spheres will be key to building these communications pipelines and then suggested a virtual montana water happy hours over the winter so possible yeah there you go discussion yeah yeah totally agree all right do we have any other questions from folks on the line again feel free to either enter those into the chat or you can unmute yourself and ask um directly to wyatt hey wyatt this is jeff reed here i'm in paradise valley and i i know chuck dalby modeled for us in our valley at one point that about 15 of the consumptive irrigation use is actually used uh in the plant um and the rest returns even you know acro across both sprinkler irrigation and and otherwise and i didn't see that data so you know you're talking roughly eighty-five percent is still inside when they returned to the ecosystem um and i i'm kind of guessing that when you said these local regional models would really tease that out and help people to understand um you know how to manage with that in in the local area i just you know wondering um is is that pretty good science that chuck i mean i love chuck he's amazing um but i don't see that in most of these reports and yet us irrigators you know we show up on this chart as using this huge chunk of water but even in sprinkler irrigation there's water returning into the aquifer so just wondering about your comments on that um so let me make sure i understand jeff thanks for the question so um water that's you're not saying water that's taken up by the plant and then not used are you you're saying so it in let's just use a sprinkler irrigation as an example it was still only 15 15 of that sprinkler irrigation was consumed by crops right across scale and so you still have a fairly significant of water that you pumped from wherever the main stem and run through your irrigation your sprinkler irrigation that's returning to the aquifer at slower paces right and it depends on the soil type but there's still a lot of return even in sprinkler irrigation um and and i might you know chuck might i don't even know if he's on the call he could correct me if i got him wrong but that was the data we were given in our watershed group yeah i think um there's certainly you know sprinkle irrigation is not it's not like drip irrigation where you literally have you know drops going into the roots of plants um so there's so there is some um some water being being put back into the aquifer from sprinklers and um i don't know about those numbers i don't know if that um i can't speak to that whether that's that's accurate um but i think that there are still opportunities in sprinkler irrigation to reduce that if that's desired right and so people have been tweaking their um tweaking their spray these things yeah yeah we just drop them down lower i mean i get i get evaporation and i get wind loss and all that sort of stuff i just think it's an important metric in you know in the hydrology to make sure you call out if we don't know we don't know or if it's too variable across soil types then i get that yeah but you still have to understand that a sprinkler irrigation system puts water down not all of which is root used by the plant and you'd have to manage accordingly right if you were gonna switch back and forth um yeah yeah totally and i think yeah more more data related to that is important i know that's been estimated um a lot of places i don't know how much that's been estimated in montana on different types of crops and things like that that's an important point and thank you i just want to say thank you this was very useful for just simple users like us who are irrigators around here um and we look forward to the report um do you can you tell us i'll say one last thing can you tell us when and how we did it yeah so um it's being printed right now and we're going to send a bunch of these out to a bunch of folks and if you're interested um please send me an email we'll get you one for sure we are also going to have a web web presence and so this will be up online very soon you'll be able to get just a pdf or read it online in a different format so thanks thanks chad um well we've got about five minutes left until one ah do we have any additional questions coming from the audience hey madison there's the there's a question in the chat um that says uh i'll just read it for you here um was compelled by some of the i think it's from adam zigler by some of the conversations where irrigators outline their biggest infrastructure issues thinking about how they're addressing these refuse to be aligned with broader ones water conservation goals and then he says it was cool to see the gold creek and teton examples of win wins in the talk are there other examples of win wins and i'm only bringing that up because i think it's a really interesting question um and maybe wyatt you have some other win wins that you could just briefly talk about yeah i mean there's there are certainly more examples of that in montana um in montana i'm not i'm not super super sure about that at this moment um there there's been a lot of win-wins i think in terms of these water leases uh and in particular you know being able to to pay farmers to reduce water use during times of scarcity and um benefiting in stream flows when that's needed so there are a lot of examples across the west that are like that um but sorry adam i don't have any other really good examples at this moment that are like the gold creek or the teton teton river awesome thank you brian and thank you adam i didn't need to breeze right past your question in the chat um awesome making sure i haven't missed anything else there well i will kind of give a final call um for questions one more if somebody wants to step up okay going once twice three times hearing nothing we can go ahead and end um our seminar for today so a big thank you to wyatt again for such a wonderful presentation and thank you to everyone for joining us today and i did um post in the chat where you can find the recording for today's seminar but essentially if you go to montana.org and navigate to media and then videos you'll be able to find it i hope to have it posted by the end of today and a quick note that next wednesday is veterans day and our offices are closed so we won't have a rough cut seminar then but our final one for the fall semester will be on november 18th um so join us then and otherwise yeah hope everyone has a wonderful wednesday and thank you again wyatt thanks you guys for having me i appreciate it thank you wyatt we really appreciate it awesome great great presentation thanks for cool applause thank y'all