Webinar series dates set for groundwater management area

The Bazile Groundwater Management Area is inviting people to stay inside where it’s warm during an upcoming winter series of one-hour webinars.

The three-part series will take place virtually via Zoom at noon on the following Fridays – Feb. 19, Feb. 26 and March 5 – and feature three different speakers.

Updates on the BGMA’s University of Nebraska-Lincoln demonstration sites and presentations on soil management strategies and groundwater research taking place within the management area will be included in the series.

The webinars will have a unique focus each week and will include a short update on the progress and changes on one of the three BGMA demonstration sites funded through a Nebraska Environmental Trust grant.

The series of webinars will feature:

-Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, who will speak during the first webinar about soil quality management.

“He received the 2020 World Food Prize for developing and mainstreaming a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that restores and conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change,” said Jeremy Milander, the management area’s Nebraska Extension cropping systems educator.

-Salvador Ramirez II, a postdoctoral research associate at UNL with expertise in agronomy and horticulture, who will speak during the second webinar about the biological and chemical properties of the soil in a diversified crop rotation.

-Troy Gilmore, a groundwater hydrologist and assistant professor at UNL, who will speak during the third webinar about his recent groundwater hydrology work on nitrate in the Bazile Creek.

The $209,500 NET grant has helped the management area to demonstrate and research best management agricultural practices to reduce nitrogen leaching into the groundwater.

The 2020 grant was for the second year of a project that is currently underway and called the “Development of Research and Demonstration Sites in the BGMA for Groundwater nitrate Reduction.”

The management area is co-sponsoring the webinars with Nebraska Extension, with financial support through the NET grant.

The series of webinars is a continuation of the informational winter meetings the BGMA has hosted in person in years past.

“The grant has an outreach aspect of it that requires field days and informational meetings,” Milander said.

The BGMA is a collaborative partnership between the Lewis and Clark, Lower Elkhorn, Lower Niobrara and Upper Elkhorn natural resources districts, as well as the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, Nebraska Extension and other partnering organizations.

The management area was formed to address the issue of rising nitrate in groundwater in the parts of Antelope, Knox and Pierce counties that are located within the four NRDs.

The BGMA covers the communities of Bazile Mills, Brunswick, Creighton, Foster, Orchard, Osmond, Plainview, Royal, Wausa and Winnetoon.

Nitrogen certification credits will be available through the series of webinars for all four NRDs that are part of the management area.

Certified Crop Adviser board-approved continuing education units also will be available for those who participate in the webinars.

The webinars have been approved for three hours – one hour per meeting – of CEUs for natural resource groundwater technicians.

The BGMA webinars will be free to attend, but people are asked to register for them online at go.unl.edu/2021-bgma-webinar.

People may also register to watch the recorded versions of the webinars if they are unable to attend the live ones.