LAUSR

Abstract Unsustainable, agriculturally related practices of water usage have caused increasing groundwater depletion in the Alluvial Aquifer in the Lower Mississippi River Valley (LMRV) of eastern Arkansas. To avoid further depletion, one method of decreasing drawdown of the Alluvial Aquifer would be to adopt agricultural management practices that increase surface infiltration, which would increase the amount of water that could potentially recharge the aquifer. The objective of this study was to evaluate surface water infiltration and infiltration-related properties in fine-textured, loessial and alluvial Alfisols under different land managements in the LMRV Delta region of eastern Arkansas. Falling-head, double-ring infiltration measurements (n = 105) were conducted as a completely random experimental design between November 2015 and July 2016 in six current major landuses: native prairie, deciduous forest, coniferous forest, Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grassland, conventional-tillage (CT) agriculture, and no-tillage (NT) agriculture. The overall infiltration rate for the 20-min measurement interval for the deciduous forest (1.17 mm min−1) was 6.7 times greater (P