Implications of spatial and temporal variations in effects of conservation practices on water management strategies

Younggu Her, Indrajeet Chaubey, Jane Frankenberger and Jaehak Jeong

Agricultural Water Management, 2017, vol. 180, issue PB, 252-266

Abstract: Conservation practices are designed and implemented to reduce soil erosion and protect water quality, but their effectiveness has been found to vary widely. This study investigated spatial and temporal variability in sediment and nutrient loads and load reductions achieved by implementing conservation practices to understand the implications of landscape heterogeneity and seasonal land-phase hydrologic variation on the effectiveness of the practices. Field-scale effects of nine conservation practices were evaluated in an agricultural watershed in the Midwest using the SWAT model. Results show that the conservation practice effectiveness, and the variability of the practice effectiveness at different locations, vary widely. Most practices are more effective in reducing nutrients in particulate than soluble forms. Practices applied to fields with higher nutrient loads do not necessarily lead to greater load reduction, indicating that an assumption of a proportional relationship between load and expected load reduction on which common targeting strategies for conservation practice placement are based may not be valid for nutrient, in particular soluble forms. The variation of the practices by fields and seasons suggests that achievement of water quality improvement requires careful selection of conservation practices and target areas considering hydrologic variations.

Keywords: conservation practice; field-scale effectiveness; sediment; phosphorus; nitrogen; targeting strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377416302475
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:180:y:2017:i:pb:p:252-266

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2016.07.004

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().