Socio-Hydrological Modeling (Engineering-Econometrics models integration)

[Hydrology]

Dear Hydrology Community,

I’m excited to highlight a recent publication from our group that may be of interest to many of you working at the intersection of hydrology, agricultural policy, and human-environment systems:

 Integrating human decision-making into a hydrological model to accurately estimate the impacts of agricultural policies
Tapas et al., 2025 – Communications Earth & Environment
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02325-x

Why it matters:
Conventional watershed models often assume ideal or full adoption of conservation practices. In this study, we couple SWAT+ with farmer decision-making data (surveyed n = 279) to simulate more realistic policy adoption scenarios. The work focuses on the Tar-Pamlico River Basin in North Carolina and evaluates practices like cover cropping and reduced nitrogen application.

Key contributions:

• A socio-hydrological modeling framework that explicitly integrates behavioral variability.

• Findings show that nitrate load reductions under actual adoption scenarios are significantly lower than those under ideal assumptions.

• Supports improved cost-benefit evaluation of incentive programs for conservation.

Feel free to reach out to the corresponding author if you're interested in discussing the methodology, exploring applications in other regions, or pursuing potential collaborations. Mahesh Tapas (tap...@osu.edu)