Development and credibility assessment of a metamodel relating water table depth to agricultural production

Phreatic groundwater pumping is affecting water availability for crops in areas with a shallow water table. This can reduce crop growth and so affect farm income. There is a need for a generic and transparent method to assess the agricultural damage caused by water table drawdown. This paper proposes such a method that consists of ‘damage tables' relating agricultural production losses to the groundwater regime for different soil/crop combinations found in Northern Belgium. The damage tables are constructed based on numerous simulations with the agrohydrological model SWAP, in which the bottom boundary conditions are gradually changed to reflect different groundwater regimes. The credibility of the resulting metamodel is assessed in three ways: using (1) field data, (2) an existing local expert system for land suitability assessment and (3) literature applying to a wider region. Field data of actual transpiration for two grasslands do not systematically deviate from the model predictions. This provides some credibility to the claim that the model captures the processes determining evapotranspiration and agricultural production. The local expert system allows us to evaluate the range of groundwater regimes where optimal growth is expected for maize and grassland across different soil types. Diverging predictions of the optimal groundwater regime between the metamodel and the local expert system can be explained in terms of differences in assumptions underlying both models. One notable limitation of the damage tables is that only direct physiological stress is reckoned while indirect effects of wet conditions (decreased accessibility of the terrain, soil structural damage) may also limit growth on soils with a water table near the surface. Further comparison with literature data focused on two issues: the contribution of groundwater to evapotranspiration and the extinction depth, i.e., the depth at which groundwater no longer contributes to evapotranspiration. This comparison revealed that damage tables developed for our area of interest are only valid under similar climatic conditions for the following two reasons: they assume a relatively small groundwater contribution to evapotranspiration, which is typical for humid climates, and they take into account temporal variations in plant characteristics such as root depth, which is also climate dependent.