Title: Constructed Wetlands for Nonpoint Source Pollution Control and Ecological Benefits on the Agricultural Landscape

Speaker: Prof. Larry Brown

Date: 14:30 p.m. Sept. 28, 2009

Location: Room 506

Prof. Brown’s Profile:

Larry is a Professor and Extension Agricultural Engineer. He has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 1988. He worked as a public health environmentalist and soils specialist in rural Tennessee before pursuing his engineering degrees.

His primary research, extension, and teaching activities at Ohio State are in agricultural water management. This includes: agricultural land drainage, controlled drainage, subirrigation, water table management, micro-irrigation, erosion and sediment control, agricultural impacts on water resource quality and quantity, agricultural constructed wetlands, water harvesting and recycling, and water resources education. These projects encompass plot- and field-scale, and small catchment research, computer modeling, etc.

Larry is the director of the internationally known Overholt Drainage Education and Research Program, the annual Overholt Drainage School, and serves as the Executive Director of the International Program for Water Management in agriculture.

He has water management (micro-irrigation) project work in Uganda, East Africa, and South Africa, and trying to develop water table management, micro-irrigation, and waterlogged and saline affected lands reclamation in India and China. Currently he works with colleagues at Wuhan University, Wuhan, China on paddy systems to harvest runoff waters linked with a constructed wetland for water treatment and recycling.

Project proposals have been developed with the University of Agricultural Sciences Darwad and Raichur, Karnataka State, India, and some past work has involved evaluating some small scale water related projects with local stakeholders in small watersheds in Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh states. Graduate and undergraduate students are involved in some international activities, including a current MS student who collected his research data in China in 2008.