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Optimizing Agricultural Best Management Practices in a Lake Erie Watershed
Author(s) -
Pyo Jongcheol,
Baek SangSoo,
Kim Minjeong,
Park Sanghun,
Lee Hyuk,
Ra JinSung,
Cho Kyung Hwa
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
jawra journal of the american water resources association
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.957
H-Index - 105
eISSN - 1752-1688
pISSN - 1093-474X
DOI - 10.1111/1752-1688.12571
Subject(s) - tillage , stakeholder , agriculture , soil and water assessment tool , watershed , environmental science , environmental resource management , agricultural engineering , water resource management , business , computer science , streamflow , economics , engineering , geography , ecology , drainage basin , cartography , management , archaeology , machine learning , biology
Implementing agricultural best management practices ( BMP s) is influenced by a balance of desired environmental outcomes, economic feasibility, and stakeholder familiarity, the latter taken to be related to BMP acceptability. To explore this balance, we developed a multi‐objective decision support system for allocating BMP type and placement by coupling the Soil and Water Assessment Tool with a nondominated sorted genetic algorithm that minimizes total phosphorus (TP) yields from agricultural hydrologic response units ( HRU s) and costs, while using stakeholder BMP familiarity as a constraint; conventional tillage, no tillage, nutrient management, riparian buffers, and contour cropping were explored. Using constraints representing current conditions, the optimization resulted in 59.6 to 81.0% reduction in agricultural TP yield from HRU s at costs ranging between US $0.8 and US $5.3 million. The constrained optimization tended to select mostly single BMP s or at most two BMP s for a given HRU due to these BMP s having higher acceptability to stakeholders. In contrast, the unconstrained case, representing full familiarity, selected 2‐ and 3‐ BMP applications. There was little difference in costs between the constrained and unconstrained cases below an 80% TP yield reduction; however, significant differences were found at larger reductions, supporting the value of stakeholder education and extension efforts. Editor's note : This paper is part of the featured series on SWAT Applications for Emerging Hydrologic and Water Quality Challenges. See the February 2017 issue for the introduction and background to the series .