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From East Carolina University News Service

East Carolina University faculty members and a graduate student have authored a new article, “Integrating human decision-making into a hydrological model to accurately estimate the impacts of agricultural policies,” in the Nature publication Communications, Earth and Environment.

 The project started in 2020 with funding from a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to study watershed resilience of the Tar-Pamlico River Basin and the future of farming in North Carolina. The interdisciplinary research team is led by Dr. Ariane Peralta, associate professor in the Department of Biology, Dr. Greg Howard, associate professor in the Department of Economics, and Dr. Randall Etheridge, associate professor in the Department of Engineering.

 In the article led by Dr. Mahesh Tapas, a 2024 graduate of ECU’s Integrated Coastal Sciences doctoral program, researchers state that the study combines water modeling and farmer behavior analysis to evaluate how well two farming practices — planting cover crops and using less nitrogen fertilizer — can reduce nitrate pollution in the Tar-Pamlico River Basin.

 “A watershed model showed that if each practice were used on 25% of farmland, nitrate runoff could be significantly reduced, with cover crops being more effective than cutting fertilizer use,” said Howard. “But when the model also considered how farmers are likely to behave — specifically, how many would voluntarily adopt these practices — the predicted benefits dropped sharply.”

Peralta said, “The model without human decision-making had overestimated the water quality benefit by eight times for cover crops and 25 times for decreased fertilizer application.”

 The team said these results show that traditional models that ignore human behavior can be misleading, and that it is crucial to include real-world decision-making in environmental policy planning.