As we saw on Monday, the measuring, valuing, and mapping of ecosystem services has progressed in recent years, and new tools are emerging that can help decision makers account for the benefits landscapes provide and target areas that are most important to ecosystem function. In the United States context, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is taking a targeted approach to improving agricultural practices and thus ensure the maintenance of healthy watersheds. The Mississippi River Basin is a priority for this initial period of funding and technical assistance, as well as the subject of a recent blog post and new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI). WRI is also working towards tools that will aid planning at both the farm and watershed scales. The following is an excerpt from a post originally published on WRI’s blog on 7 January 2014.
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More than 15,000 streams, rivers, and lakes in the United States are too polluted with nutrient runoff to support wildlife, be enjoyed recreationally, or serve as a drinking water source. In the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), a region that encompasses about 41 percent of the continental United States, the majority of the local water quality pollution stems from farming activities involving fertilizer and livestock manure use. The MRB drains into the Gulf of Mexico, where the county’s largest “dead zone,” an oxygen-devoid region, forms every spring and wipes out aquatic life and fisheries.
Few programs have seen widespread success in tackling either local or the Gulf’s growing water quality problems, but an emerging initiative could present a way forward. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative (MRBI) in 2009. New WRI research finds that with some specific improvements, the MRBI’s new approach could play a key role in improving the nation’s inland and coastal water quality.
A Growing Dead Zone Problem
When water bodies become over-enriched with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus they suffer from eutrophication, a condition in which harmful algae blooms rob the water of oxygen. Eutrophic waters can become “hypoxic,” or hold too little oxygen to support aquatic life, and large, persistent dead zones can occur. According to WRI’s interactive map of eutrophication and hypoxia, more than 500 coastal water bodies around the world currently suffer from dead zones. Most of the nutrient pollution comes from farm use of fertilizers and manure, while other sources include municipal sewage treatment plants and household septic tanks.
An Innovative Approach to Water Quality Management
The USDA has implemented conservation programs for decades in an effort to address on-farm environmental and natural resource problems like water pollution, habitat destruction, and degradation of wetlands. These programs focus on the farm scale, working one-on-one with farmers to solve problems on individual fields through the installation and maintenance of conservation practices like stream-side buffers, cover crops, and nutrient management plans. But while these programs have helped curb soil erosion, preserve wildlife habitat, and improve manure management on individual fields, they have failed to produce results at the scale necessary to cut back enough nutrient and sediment pollution to clean up nearby waterways.
So now the federal government is trying a new tack. The MRBI is one of handful of relatively new initiatives from the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) that target conservation funding at the landscape scale rather than operating only at the individual farm-or-field scale.
MRBI is unique in that it uses a targeted watershed project and partnership approach to deliver the same financial and technical assistance NRCS has been providing for years. Rather than working with individual farmers dispersed across the rural landscape, NRCS now uses a portion of conservation program funds to work with many cooperating farmers located in selected, high-priority MRBI watersheds. Partners from state agricultural and water quality agencies, watershed groups, universities, and farm and environmental non-governmental organizations help in the implementation of these watershed projects. The idea is that by targeting multiple, strategically located farms in affected watersheds, MRBI will be able to improve the water quality of a stream or river in that watershed.
By taking this new approach, NRCS and its partners aim to implement the most cost-effective and appropriate conservation practices on a scale adequate enough to reduce the nutrient and sediment runoff impairing the project waterbody. The density and intensity of the conservation effort in an MRBI watershed means that MRBI projects are poised to generate both farm- and landscape-scale benefits. Over time, such projects will hopefully result in measurable improvements in local water quality and reduced dead zones…
Read More:
A New Strategy to Improve Water Quality – One Targeted Watershed at a Time – Michelle Perez, WRI Insights Blog
Improving Water Quality: A Review of the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watershed Initiative (MRBI) To Target US Farm Conservation Funds – Michelle Perez and Sarah Walker
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