Farm – Level Optimization of Bmp Placement for Cost – Effective Pollution Reduction

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Gitau, Margaret W. Veith, Tamie L. Gburek, William J.
Copyright Year	2004
Abstract	With best management practices (BMPs) being used increasingly to control agricultural pollutant losses to surface waters, establishing the environmental effectiveness of these practices has become important. Additionally, cost implications of establishing and maintaining environmentally effective BMPs are often a crucial factor in selecting and adopting BMPs. This article considers both water quality and economic concerns and presents a methodology developed for determining costeffective farmor watershed-level scenarios through optimization. This optimization technique uniquely incorporates three existing tools: a genetic algorithm (GA), a watershed-level nonpoint-source model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool, SWAT), and a BMP tool. The GA combines initial pollutant loadings from SWAT with literature-based pollution reduction efficiencies from the BMP tool and with BMP costs to determine cost-effective watershed scenarios. The methodology was successfully applied to a 300 ha farm within the Cannonsville Reservoir watershed, a phosphorus (P) restricted reservoir within New York City’s water supply system. An average reduction in dissolved P of 60% over the lifetime of the BMPs was set as the pollutant target. A baseline scenario was established to represent practices on the farm before BMP implementation. The most costeffective scenario for the farm, under the presented methodology, achieved a cost-effectiveness of 0.6 kg dissolved P reduction per dollar spent per year. Additionally, the methodology determined alternative scenarios for the farm, which met the pollution reduction criterion cost-effectively. The methodology, as developed, is extendable to multi-farm or watershed-level evaluations.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://lshs.tamu.edu/docs/lshs/end-notes/farm%20level%20optimization%20of%20bmp%20placement%20for%20cost-effective%20p-3415024139/farm%20level%20optimization%20of%20bmp%20placement%20for%20cost-effective%20pollution%20reduction.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Alveolar Bone Loss BMP file format Baseline (configuration management) Best practice Clinical act of insertion Cost Effectiveness Efficiency Estimated Evaluation Extensibility Feature selection Field research File spanning Genetic algorithm HRU (security) Heuristic Heuristics Large Management Information Systems Mathematical optimization Norm (social) Numerous Open-source software Phosphorus Reduction criterion Reservoir Device Component Reservoir computing SWAT Software release life cycle Solutions TYPSET and RUNOFF Water Supply Watershed (image processing) pollutant
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article