Fencing farm dams to exclude livestock halves methane emissions and improves water quality.

ABSTRACT: Agricultural practices have created tens of millions of small artificial water bodies ("farm dams" or "agricultural ponds") to provide water for domestic livestock worldwide. Among freshwater ecosystems, farm dams have some of the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per m² due to fertilizer and manure run-off boosting methane production-an extremely potent GHG. However, management strategies to mitigate the substantial emissions from millions of farm dams remain unexplored. We tested the hypothesis that installing fences to exclude livestock could reduce nutrients, improve water quality, and lower aquatic GHG emissions. We established a large-scale experiment spanning 400 km across south-eastern Australia where we compared unfenced (N = 33) and fenced farm dams (N = 31) withi

SUBMITTER: Malerba ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9327511 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature