J.D. Rhoades

1. Extend our recently developed automated/mobilized salinity-measurement/spatial statistics technology for inventorying soil salinity from the field- to the regional-scale
    
2. Incorporate additional geophysical sensors in the above-mentioned salinity assessment system and develop more rigorous interpretive "inversion" techniques, in order to be able to more accurately determine the salt concentration of the soil water throughout the rootzone and percolating from it
    
3. Develop measurement/spatial-statistics methodology needed for monitoring soil salinity and determining effects of management changes on the status and spatial distribution of salinity in rootzones and fields
    
4. Complete development of user-friendly software to process assessment data, to display spatial patterns of soil salinity and to identify sources/causes of salt-loading
    
5. Assist the Natural Resources Conservation Service in the implementation of this technology
    
6. Develop integrated, measurement/GIS assessment-technology to identify the sources and causes of soil salinity within fields and irrigation projects and to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of irrigation/drainage management practices for salinity control, water conservation and water quality protection
    
7. Develop a generic method for coupling deterministic solute transport models into geographic information systems for use in field- and project- scale assessments of agricultural impacts on soil salinity and water quality
    
8. Develop a user-friendly, low-cost "Arc-View 2" based predictive model which operates on a PC-platform for use by action agencies in assessing soil and water salination and environmental pollution
    
9. Evaluate the scale- and time-dependencies of mechanistic and functional solute transport models for use in GIS-based salinity management/control applications
    
10. Develop and evaluate a GIS-based approach for measuring and predicting the regional- scale distribution of non-point source (NPS) agricultural pollutants (i.e., salinity and trace elements) for use as a decision-making tool in for mulating irrigation, drainage and cropping strategies to conserve water and to protect groundwater quality
     
11. Develop transfer functions from simple, readily-available soil properties to estimate the physicochemical transport parameters required in functional and mechanistic solute transport models applied at regional scales
     
12. Ascertain the uncertainties associated with the regional-scale prediction of NPS agricultural pollutants