Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2022 Program

Maria Fleury ’22
CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Certificate in Environmental Studies
WATER AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
THESIS TITLE
Changing Water
Availability in the São
Francisco River Basin,
Brazil: Exploring the
Role of Expanding
Agriculture and Climate
Change
ADVISER
Reed Maxwell,
Professor of Civil and
Environmental
Engineering and the
High Meadows
Envrionmental Institute
Human activities such as agriculture depend
on and also can substantially affect water
availability. Therefore, it is a concern that
water resources are quickly being depleted in
regions that already experience drought, such
as the São Francisco River basin in Brazil. My
thesis explored how the growth of large-scale
agriculture — in the face of climate change —
affects water availability at the São Francisco
River basin and its sub-basins of the Alto,
Submédio, Médio and Alto São Francisco rivers.
My work quantified trends in agricultural
land-use, climate patterns and decreased
water resources by combining remote-sensing
observations of land-use change, water surface
area and center pivot irrigation by MapBiomas,
GRACE observations of total water storage, and
GLDAS climate reanalysis data. I combined
and analyzed climate and land-use datasets to
estimate the water used by center pivot irrigation
systems. I found that across the São Francisco
River basin agricultural land-use is growing, air
temperature is increasing, and rainfall and water
storage are decreasing. I found that the depletion
of water resources is most pronounced in the
Médio and Alto São Francisco sub-basins, where
I also observed the largest growth in agriculture
and center-pivot irrigation.
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