Keiser receives USDA-NIFA project grant

David Keiser, assistant professor of economics, was among those announced as a grant recipient through USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s National Integrated Water Quality Program. The National Integrated Water Quality Program promotes science-based decision making and management practices that improve the quality and quantity of the nation’s water resources in agricultural, rural, and urbanizing watersheds.

Over the next three years, Keiser will work with six other Iowa State University researchers, John Downing, professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Phil Gassman, associate scientist at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD), Matthew Helmers, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Thomas Isenhart, associate professor in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, and Catherine Kling, director of CARD. Keiser’s project was awarded $660,000 for development of a hydrologic-economic model that estimates the economic values of water across various uses.

Focusing on the Upper Mississippi and Ohio Tennessee River basins, the researchers hope to use econometric analyses to improve estimates of the economic value of water to agriculture by using new land use and land management data sources. The project, Keiser said, has two main goals—developing an integrated hydrologic-economic model to measure spatially-explicit values of water across uses, and engaging students, farmers, and the general public on the economic value of water and its role in efficient and effective water policies.

(Released May 2015)