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Situation:
Decision-makers and landowners need accurate, “place-based” information on current conditions and risks to water quality, quantity and habitat to implement effective watershed planning and restoration. However, information at these scales is often absent, inaccessible or difficult to interpret by decision-makers and stakeholders.
Approach:
This focus area will bring together LGU expertise, momentum and partnerships in field/watershed modeling to help decision makers, NRCS, land managers and producers identify critical areas for protection, pollution abatement and restoration. This focus area benefits from a number of ongoing NIFA projects (e.g., NRI, NIWQP Integrated and National Facilitation Grants) and can leverage efforts with considerable local, state and regional support. This focus area promotes geo-spatial decision support models to target management practices on many scales. Cornell will expand the use of the Variable Source Area (VSA) hydrologic approach at the field scale to target specific “Critical Management Zones” to reduce the risk of pollutant loading.
Stakeholders:
Volunteer monitoring groups, NRCS, producers, local, state and regional government officials, watershed organizations, local chapters of organizations like Trout Unlimited, researchers, Extension and the shellfish industry.
Sampling of Programs in the Region:
Researchers at Cornell are developing the use of the Variable Source Area (VSA), a physical hydrology concept. The related water quality risk assessment concept is the "Hydrologically Sensitive Area" (HSA) which is used to determine a probability of pollutant transport risk. By combining several existing ideas about how to describe VSAs, they are developing and assessing ways to identify and quantify HSAs. Places where HSAs coincide with potential pollutant loading areas are "Critical Management Zones" (CMZs) and management strategies can be designed to avoid pollutant loading in these parts of a watershed.
The Stream Visual Assessment Protocol (SVAP) tool was developed by the US Department of Agriculture and modified for New Jersey streams by Rutgers Cooperative Extension Water Resources Program. SVAP has been used extensively by the Water Resources Program to document stream conditions and relate these conditions to land use, water quality, and habitat. With the data that is collected, stream reaches can be photo-documented and even monitored for changes over the long-term. More than 700 stream reaches have been visually assessed with SVAP.
Rutgers and URI will share outputs of the Multi-State Hatch project “S-1042: Modeling for TMDL Development and Watershed Based Planning, Management and Assessment”. We will also incorporate social science results from regional NIWQP projects to improve stakeholder use of data-intensive information.
Cross-cutting work with other focus areas
The Watershed Modeling & Assessment focus area the NEMO focus area to explore opportunties and methods to improve the use of watershed assesssment data by local land use decision makers. Watershed Modeling & Assessment team members work with those in NEMO and Sustainable Landscaping focus areas to restore watershed and water quality via rain gardens and shoreline buffers.
