Zeyuan Qiu
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Conservation buffers are a widely used best management practice for reducing agricultural nonpoint source pollution. There are two comprehensive watershed planning approaches being developed to plan the conservation buffer placement in agricultural watersheds in addition to conventional riparian buffer placement strategy. Terrain analysis evaluates topographic attributes in relation to agricultural source areas to identify locations where runoff loadings would be relatively greater for conservation buffer placement. Alternatively, soil surveys are evaluated to identify soil map units where slope, soil, and water table attributes present relatively better conditions for trapping pollutants in runoff from agricultural areas. Although conservation buffers provides multiple ecosystem services in watersheds, the current conservation buffer planning strategies tend to use a single criterion, most frequently a hydrological or soil condition indicator, to guide conservation buffer placement. This study will evaluate those planning approaches that prioritize agricultural lands for conservation buffers using multiple criteria. These criteria include soil erodibility, hydrological sensitivity, wildlife habitat, and impervious surface that are derived from different data sources and capture the conservation buffers’ ecosystem services in reducing soil erosion, controlling runoff generation, enhancing wildlife habitat, and mitigating stormwater impacts, respectively. A multidisciplinary panel is organized to assign weights to these criteria. A multi-criteria analysis is conducted to calculate and compare the total ecosystem service values of the prioritized agricultural lands under the two planning strategies. This study will calculate the total program cost of converting prioritized agricultural lands to conservation buffers under different strategies and compares their cost-effectiveness. The comparison study would provide further practical guidance on conservation buffer planning.