Summary: An important barrier to implementing best management practices for water quality improvement in agricultural settings is the inability to access privately held data to identify and target critical source areas. To implement these practices where the largest gains in water quality can be realized, the gap in knowledge that must be addressed is how to gain access to this data to identify and install best management practices to field systems with the highest risk of nutrient runoff. To address this knowledge gap, this project will be the first to form a public-private partnership to demonstrate how data from private crop consultants and farmers can be used to target best management practices to fields with the highest soil phosphorus concentrations. At these locations, the practices will be more effective and accelerate water quality improvements while enhancing farm enterprise economics. This novel approach is particularly needed in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB) where approximately ten percent of cropland has soil phosphorus levels that are more than double recommended agronomic ranges. These “legacy phosphorus” sites can persist for decades and continue to leach nutrients to downstream ecosystems. They have been consistently identified as major contributors to nutrient runoff and downstream impacts such as harmful algal blooms and eutrophication. There is an urgent need to develop a method to overcome this knowledge gap because currently there are no conservation programs focused on legacy phosphorus locations. Without this knowledge, many of the most important sites contributing to nutrient runoff will remain untreated, greatly hindering the achievement of water quality goals in many agriculturally dominated watersheds.
Funding provided by NIFA Project #OHO03035-CG
Publications
Brooker, M.R., J. D’ambrosio, M.M.L. Jones, M. Kalcic, K.W. King, G. Labarge, T. Panchalingam, B.E. Roe, E.R. Schwab, C. Soldo, N.D. Stoltzfus, R.S. Wilson, R.J. Winston and J.F. Martin. 2021. “A Public-Private Partnerships to Locate Fields for Implementation and Monitoring of Best Management Practices to Treat Legacy Phosphorus”. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (Waste Management in Agroecosystems), 5: 742817.