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Landscape Planning for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction I: A Geographical Allocation Framework

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Abstract

Agricultural nonpoint source pollution remains a persistent environmental problem, despite the large amount of money that has been spent on its abatement. At local scales, agricultural best management practices (BMPs) have been shown to be effective at reducing nutrient and sediment inputs to surface waters. However, these effects have rarely been found to act in concert to produce measurable, broad-scale improvements in water quality. We investigated potential causes for this failure through an effort to develop recommendations for the use of riparian buffers in addressing nonpoint source pollution in Wisconsin. We used frequency distributions of phosphorus pollution at two spatial scales (watershed and field), along with typical stream phosphorus (P) concentration variability, to simulate benefit/cost curves for four approaches to geographically allocating conservation effort. The approaches differ in two ways: (1) whether effort is aggregated within certain watersheds or distributed without regard to watershed boundaries (dispersed), and (2) whether effort is targeted toward the most highly P-polluting fields or is distributed randomly with regard to field-scale P pollution levels. In realistic implementation scenarios, the aggregated and targeted approach most efficiently improves water quality. For example, with effort on only 10% of a model landscape, 26% of the total P load is retained and 25% of watersheds significantly improve. Our results indicate that agricultural conservation can be more efficient if it accounts for the uneven spatial distribution of potential pollution sources and the cumulative aspects of environmental benefits.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The authors thank the Wisconsin Buffer Initiative Advisory Committee for contributing ideas and feedback throughout this project, Laura Ward Good for providing the phosphorus index data, Dale Robertson for providing the stream phosphorus data, and Brian Weidel for coding the statistical simulations. Emily Stanley and Chris Solomon provided comments that substantially improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 680 North Park Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Matthew W. Diebel, Jeffrey T. Maxted & M. Jake Vander Zanden

  2. Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 550 North Park Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Peter J. Nowak

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  1. Matthew W. Diebel
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Correspondence to Matthew W. Diebel.

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Diebel, M.W., Maxted, J.T., Nowak, P.J. et al. Landscape Planning for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction I: A Geographical Allocation Framework. Environmental Management 42, 789–802 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-008-9186-3

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