Dept: Sustainable Ag
Projected Grad: 2024
Co-Advisors: John Tyndall, Emily Zimmerman
Presentation Title:
Identifying Existing BMPs to Improve Conservation Efforts
Summary:
By identifying existing conservation efforts, conservation planners have a more complete picture of the landscape and watershed economics.
Partners in water quality management (NRCS, watershed associations, drainage districts, state agriculture or environmental departments, etc.) have entered a new era of conservation planning capacity based on new, publicly available data and powerful geospatial decision support tools. One such tool is the USDA Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF), which evaluates spatial placement of best management practices (BMPs) at watershed scales based on conservation heuristics, elevation data, and hydrology. This allows for innovative ways to assess conservation scenarios across watershed scales. An allied ACPF tool calculates the direct and opportunity costs and can estimate cost effectiveness of different conservation scenarios. Another new and useful data set, the Iowa BMP Mapping Project, has mapped where structural conservation practices such as terraces, contour buffer strips, and grassed waterways, among others, are currently located across Iowa. By using multiple spatial data and tools, such as the BMP Mapping Project and the ACPF, spatially targeted conservation can be more accurate, comprehensive, and useful to planners.
To demonstrate the utility of these tools and data, we selected three Iowa HUC-10 watersheds and created various conservation plans associated with watershed level goals using the ACPF and Iowa BMP Mapping Project data to enhance water quality. The three case-study HUC-10 watersheds were chosen because they have the highest number of impaired lakes in Iowa, according to the 2018 list from the Iowa DNR. We overview how these data and tools allow planners to determine where conservation opportunities exist within a given watershed, recognize the temporal and spatial scale of existing conservation efforts, identify where existing BMPs can be enhanced via complimentary BMPs and/or increased connectivity at landscape and hydrologic scales, and consider where individual BMPs can be evaluated for comparative advantage at field scales.
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