Agricultural landscapes are more sensitive to climatic variability than natural landscapes because tillage and grazing typically reduce water infiltration and increase rates and magnitudes of surface runoff. This paper evaluates how agricultural land use influenced the relative responsiveness of floods, erosion, and sedimentation to extreme and nonextreme hydrologic activity occurring in watersheds of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Temporally overlapping stratigraphic and historical instrumental records from southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois show how agricultural modification of a natural prairie and forest land cover affected the behavior of floods and sedimentation during the last two centuries. For comparison, pre-agriculture [...]
