Remegio B. Confesor

Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research | NIBIO · Division of Environment and natural resources

Farmers typically avoid applying fertilizer when it is raining, a factor that most previous SWAT models did not account for. Enhancing the SWAT model to simulate fertilizer application based on rainfall timing will better reflect real-world practices.

It remains a challenge to understand how dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is cycled from farmlands to rivers due to the complex interaction between farming practices, the baseflow hydrology of predominantly flat lowlands, and seasonal environmental influences such as snowpack. To address this, field DOC concentrations were measured monthly throughout...

Hydrologic models are indispensable tools for water resource planning and management. Accurate model predictions are critical for better water resource development and management decisions. Single-site model calibration and calibrating a watershed model at the watershed outlet are commonly adopted strategies. In the present study, for the first tim...

This study investigates the combined impacts of climate change and agricultural conservation on the magnitude and uncertainty of nutrient loadings in the Maumee River Watershed, the second‐largest watershed of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Two scenarios — baseline agricultural management and increased agricultural conservation — were assessed using a...

Improving understanding of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) cycling from farmlands to rivers is a challenge due to the complex influence of farming practices, the hydrology of predominantly flat lowlands, and seasonal snowpack effects. Monthly field DOC concentrations were measured throughout the year at sub-basin scale across the Chippewa River Wate...

The effect of agricultural practices on water quality of Old Woman Creek (OWC) watershed was evaluated in a hydrological model using the Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) climate data and 20 different global circulation models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). A hydrological mod...

The separate and synergistic effects of land use and climate change on water quality variables in Old Woman Creek (OWC) watershed were evaluated using a hydrological model set up in Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for the OWC watershed. Model calibration was done using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and pareto optimization. The Para...

The effect of the projected 21st century climate change on water quality in Old Woman Creek (OWC) watershed was evaluated using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and the precipitation and temperature projections from three best Global Climate Circulation Model (GCM)l ensemble downloaded from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5...

Reducing harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie, situated between the United States and Canada, requires implementing best management practices to decrease nutrient loading from upstream sources. Bi-national water quality targets have been set for total and dissolved phosphorus loads, with the ultimate goal of reaching these targets in 9-out-of-10 years...

Watershed-scale hydrologic models are frequently used to inform conservation and restoration efforts by identifying critical source areas (CSAs; alternatively 'hotspots'), defined as areas that export relatively greater quantities of nutrients and sediment. The CSAs can then be prioritized or 'targeted' for conservation and restoration to ensure ef...

Agricultural field- and watershed-scale water quality models are used to assess the potential impact of management practices to reduce nutrient and sediment exports. However, observed data are often not available to calibrate and verify these models. Three years of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service's 12 pair...

Hydrologic models are applied increasingly with climate projections to provide insights into future hydrologic conditions. However, both hydrologic models and climate models can produce a wide range of predictions based on model inputs, assumptions, and structure. To characterize a range of future predictions, it is common to use multiple climate m...

Tracking changes in stream nutrient inputs to Lake Erie over multidecadal time scales depends on the use of statistical methods that can remove the influence of year-to-year variability of streamflow but also explicitly consider the influence of long-term trends in streamflow. The methods introduced in this paper include an extended version of Weig...

For Lake Erie, it is already time to revise the phosphorus target loads set to address the problem of cyanobacterial blooms in the Western Basin. Current targets were proposed by the Annex 4 task group in 2015, adopted by U.S. and Canadian governments in 2016, and set as objectives of domestic action plans in 2017. These targets, applicable to all...

The contribution of macropore flow to phosphorus (P) loadings in tile‐drained agricultural landscapes remains poorly understood at the field scale, despite the recognized deleterious impacts of contaminant transport via macropore pathways. A new subroutine that couples existing matrix‐excess and matrix‐desiccation macropore flow theory and a modifi...

During the re‐eutrophication of Lake Erie, dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP) loading and concentrations to the lake have nearly doubled, while particulate phosphorus (PP) has remained relatively constant. One potential cause of increased DRP concentrations is P stratification, or the buildup of soil‐test P (STP) in the upper soil layer (<5 cm). S...

Due to resource constraints, long-term monitoring data for calibration and validation of hydrologic and water quality models are rare. As a result, most models are calibrated and, if possible, validated using limited measured data. However, little research has been done to determine the impact of length of available calibration data on model parame...

In response to degraded water quality, federal policy makers in the US and Canada called for a 40% reduction in phosphorus (P) loads to Lake Erie, and state and provincial policy makers in the Great Lakes region set a load- reduction target for the year 2025. Here, we configured five separate SWAT (US Department of Agriculture’s Soil and Water Asse...

Cumulative daily load time series show that the early 2000s marked a step‐change increase in riverine soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) loads entering the Western Lake Erie Basin from three major tributaries: the Maumee, Sandusky, and Raisin Rivers. These elevated SRP loads have been sustained over the last 12 yr. Empirical regression models were u...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) have been increasing in extent and intensity in the western basin of Lake Erie. The cyanobacteria Microcystis produces toxins that pose serious threats to animal and human health, resulting in beach closures and impaired water supplies, and have even forced a “do not drink” advisory for the City of Toledo water system fo...

The Phosphorus Index (PI) has been the cornerstone for phosphorus (P)-based management and planning over the past twenty years, yet field-scale evaluation of many state PIs has been limited. In this study, P loads measured in surface runoff and tile discharge from 40 agricultural fields in Ohio with prevailing management practices were used to eval...

Cyanobacterial blooms in western Lake Erie have recently garnered widespread attention. Current evidence indicates that a major source of the nutrients that fuel these blooms is the Maumee River. We applied a seasonal trend decomposition technique to examine long-term and seasonal changes in Maumee River discharge, and nutrient concentrations and l...

Lake Erie has undergone re-eutrophication beginning in the 1990s, even though total phosphorus (TP) loads to the lake continued to slowly decline. Using our 1982 and 2007–10 studies of the bioavailability of dissolved and particulate phosphorus export from major Ohio tributaries, together with our long-term TP and dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP...

Lagrangian analyses is used to evaluate the processing of nutrients and sediments during storm runoff events as water moved from the Maumee River loading station at Waterville, OH through the lower river, Maumee Bay and into Lake Erie's western basin. Chemical signatures of storm water at Waterville were used in combination with frequent collection...

This observational study was conducted to assess the movement of nitrate and phosphorus into and through the soil profile beneath a compacted gravel compost pad. The accumulation of nitrate and phosphorus in the vegetated filter strip immediately downslope of the pad was also evaluated. Soil samples were taken from the composting site and the immed...

There is little information about the changes in physical and chemical properties of compost as a function of compost feedstocks and age of the compost mixture. As a consequence of this gap, the potential of compost to serve as a pollutant source relative to compost age (from initial mixing of raw feedstocks to mature compost) and feedstocks (i.e....

The quantity and quality of compost leachate depend on the age and composition of the composting materials and this study was undertaken to assess the changes in nutrient concentration and load of leachates coming from different compost mixtures and ages. Three different compost mixes (farm, food, yard waste composts) at different ages from fresh t...

Richards, R. Peter, Ibrahim Alameddine, J. David Allan, David B. Baker, Nathan S. Bosch, Remegio Confesor, Joseph V. DePinto, David M. Dolan, Jeffrey M. Reutter, and Donald Scavia, 2012. Discussion –“Nutrient Inputs to the Laurentian Great Lakes by Source and Watershed Estimated Using SPARROW Watershed Models” by Dale M. Robertson and David A. Saad...

In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest harmful algal bloom in its recorded history, with a peak intensity over three times greater than any previously observed bloom. Here we show that long-term trends in agricultural practices are consistent with increasing phosphorus loading to the western basin of the lake, and that these trends, coupled wit...

The recurrence of massive harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the western basin of Lake Erie since the mid-1990s is largely attributed to excessive loads of sediment and phosphorus (P) from the Maumee and Sandusky rivers. Data from the National Center for Water Quality Research (NCWQR) show that the dissolved P load has been increasing since the mid-199...

Phase 2 of the Distributed Model Intercomparison Project (DMIP 2) was formulated primarily as a mechanism to help guide the US National Weather Service (NWS) as it expands its use of spatially distributed watershed models for operational river, flash flood, and water resources forecasting. The overall purpose of DMIP 2 was to test many distributed...

Researchers have been exploring the selection and optimal placement of best management practices (BMPs) to reduce nonpoint source pollution from agricultural lands. One vital component in these studies is the use of watershed models, specifically the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). However, SWAT output variables in the subwatershed reaches d...

Distributed hydrologic models based on small-scale physical processes tend to have a large number of parameters to represent spatial heterogeneity. This characteristic requires the use of a large number of parameters in model calibration. It is a common view that calibration with a large number parameters produces overparameterization and overfitti...

The objective of this research was the development of a method that integrated an activity analysis model of profits from production with a biophysical model, and included the capacity for optimization over multiple objectives. We specified a hybrid genetic algorithm using activity analysis as a local search method, and NSGA-II for calculation of t...

A water quality index (WQI) is a single numeric score used to characterize the water quality of a certain place at a particular time. WQI's are commonly employed to assess water quality and the complex, multidimensional data collected from water quality monitoring. The greatest difficulty in constructing a water quality index is deciding on what we...

The research in conversion of agricultural biomass into ethanol has gained momentum due to high price of petroleum, the demand to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the recent US government policy on reducing foreign oil dependence. However, research in production and supply technologies should also be done in conjunction with ethanol conversion...

The bootstrap method is primarily done to determine the variability of a statistic by creating a large number of dataset sampled with replacement from the original dataset. Simply put, a population sample is to the population as a bootstrap sample is to the population sample.

This presentation illustrates a novel way of integrating the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) with data envelopment analysis (DEA) and index number models to yield trade-offs between farm profit and water quality using genetic algorithm and Pareto preference ordering.

  In optimization problems with at least two conflicting objectives, a set of solutions rather than a unique one exists because of the trade-offs between these objectives. A Pareto optimal solution set is achieved when a solution cannot be improved upon without degrading at least one of its objective criteria. This study investigated the applicatio...

In contrast to lumped-parameter models, the distributed and processed-based hydrologic models take into account the spatial distribution of the hydrologic processes but became highly parameterized. In the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for example, the watershed is subdivided into spatial units (subbasins and hydrologic response units, HRU's...

This study explored the application of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) and Pareto ordering in the multiple-objective automatic calibration of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). SWAT was calibrated in the Calapooia watershed, Oregon, USA, with two different pairs of objective functions in a cluster of 24 parallel computers. T...

Previously puddled rice soil cracks upon drying. The bulk of irrigation applied may flow through the cracks, bypassing the soil matrix. For assessing irrigation efficiency, it is important to include this bypass flow in the infiltration equation. The Philip's cumulative infiltration equation (I=St0.5+k, where, I is the cumulative infiltration (mm),...

Weeds are major constraints to wider adoption of wet seeded rice. Two split-plot experiments on water management during crop establishment of wet seeded rice were conducted in the dry and wet seasons of 1994 to quantify crop stand establishment and weed suppression by herbicides and rice genotypes. The latter consisted of five previously identified...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 2004. Microfilm (positive).