Contributions to groundwater from National Forest lands in the Mississippi Embayment: a century-long simulation

Very little effort has been devoted to analyzing the contributions of National Forests to groundwater resources in the USA and around the world. In this study, the US Geological Survey’s MERAS (Mississippi Embayment Regional Aquifer Study) model was used in the ModelMuse simulating system to estimate more than a century of subsurface hydrologic processes, groundwater budgets, and spatial-temporal groundwater level distributions in three forests in Mississippi, USA. The results showed that groundwater recharge and stream leakage are important for groundwater storage in this region. All three forests served as groundwater sinks at times and sources at others, but the volume changes were relatively small. Groundwater levels declined over the simulation period – 1900 to 2014 – beneath all three forests, especially around the DNF (Delta National Forest) where groundwater abstraction is relatively intense. Knowledge gained from long-term hydrologic simulations and water budgets ision is relatively intense. Knowledge gained from long-term hydrologic simulations and water budgets is useful when managing forest land groundwater resources.