Engineers part of team examining climate resiliency through soil

Two Nebraska Engineering faculty - Seunghee Kim and Saleh Taghvaeian - are part of an interdisciplinary team from three universities that is focusing on water stress in the High Plains that is threatening agriculture and rural communities to find ways to improve soil moisture preservation and help rural areas become more climate resilient.

As drought conditions persist because of climate change, it’s expected farmers will have to irrigate more, and even with more irrigation, yields are expected to drop.

“In regions with irrigation, more water will be needed under the hotter and drier conditions,” said Kim, associate professor of civil engineering and the project’s lead investigator. “Preservation of soil moisture will therefore be a critical objective under rainfed and irrigated conditions.”