ABSTRACT The Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) is a crucial area known for its intensive agricultural production that is heavily dependent on the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer (MRVAA) for irrigation. This region's agriculture relies extensively on this underlying aquifer to sustain its crop production needs. Extensive irrigation with groundwater, coupled with regional geology, has led to significant groundwater decline. The LMRB includes large areas of eastern Arkansas and Louisiana, western Tennessee and Mississippi, and the bootheel of Missouri, with the most severe overdraft of the MRVAA occurring in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi, which is therefore the regional focus of this paper. In parts of Arkansas, the decline has been so severe that these areas have been designated as Critical Groundwater Areas. This manuscript identified relevant literature that pinpoints challenges and the strategies used in response to the decline. Experimental strategies being explored to potentially increase groundwater levels include case studies of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) using infiltration galleries (IGs), riverbank filtration coupled with groundwater transfer followed by injection wells, and repurposed borrow pits, which are all techniques tailored to the region's hydrogeology. Strategies to transition irrigation from groundwater to surface water involve on‐farm reservoir‐tailwater recovery systems (R‐TWRS), which store and recycle irrigation runoff and excess precipitation to reduce groundwater dependence. Findings from this paper demonstrate how conservation strategies such as MAR and R‐TWRS are designed to mitigate the ongoing decline of the alluvial aquifer that is crucial for the economic and ecological sustainability of the LMRB. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Engineering Water > Planning Water Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness
Iqbal et al. (Sun,) studied this question.