2025 Great Plains Water Conference: Securing Water Resources for Tomorrow
September 18 and 19, 2025
Milo Bail Student Center, University of Nebraska Omaha
The Nebraska Water Center hosted the 2025 Great Plains Water Conference on September 18 and 19. Held at the Milo Bail Student Center on the University of Nebraska Omaha’s campus, this regional event included speakers and attendees from eight states across the region. The conference theme was Securing Water Resources for Tomorrow, and speakers shared their expertise in water smart communities and watersheds, water quality monitoring and treatment strategies, emerging contaminants, wellhead protection, education and outreach, basin management, and more. Researchers, governments, nonprofits, state agencies, and students from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, and North Dakota shared how communities across the Great Plains are planning for their future water resources.
The conference was approved for 11 hours of continuing education credits through the Nebraska water well standards. Approved sessions are marked (*) on the draft agenda linked above.
The conference agenda is linked above, including an overview of the full agenda and abstracts and speaker biographies for each section. Recordings of several conference sessions are available on our YouTube page.
This event was sponsored by the Kansas Water Institute and the University of Nebraska – Lincoln's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Student Research Poster Competition
Students from across the Great Plains competed in the Student Research Poster Competition to share their work and gain skills in public speaking and networking. The following students were awarded prizes for their presentations.
First place: Dilli Ram Bhattarai, Rita Khadka, and Ladya Spor Leal. University of Nebraska – Lincoln, poster titled “Conservation Reserve Program and Hydrology in the Northern High Plains: An Integrated Model of Economic, Land-Use, and Hydrological Dynamics”
Second place: Kalynn Meyer, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, poster titled “Real-Time In-Season Variable Rate Corn Fertilizer Application Using Canopy Sensors and UAVs”
Third place: Kalley Collins, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, poster titled “Monitoring lysimeter pore water samples in agricultural soils to quantify carbon dioxide removal of an enhanced rock weathering project deployed in Nebraska”
Fourth place: Deepak Verma, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, poster titled “Monitoring Seasonal and Long-Term Structural Dynamics of Shasta Gravity Dam Using InSAR Data and Methods”
Fifth place: Evelyn Reyes, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, poster titled “Seasonal Variation and Co-Occurrence of Microplastics and Antibiotics in an Agricultural Watershed”