The under-appreciated climate factor in CEAP

Excerpt

Decade-long climate variations and associated impacts on runoff, soil erosion, and agrichemical movement may play a critical role in addressing the objectives of the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP). CEAP is a multi-agency effort to quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices used by private landowners participating in selected U. S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs (Mausbach and Dedrick, 2004). The project has two components, the National Assessment which provides summary estimates of conservation practice benefits, and the Watershed Assessment Studies that conducts basic research on conservation practices in selected watersheds to provide a framework for evaluating and improving the performance of national assessment models. In the context of the second component of CEAP, impacts of decade-long precipitation variations on runoff-induced soil erosion and agrichemical movement are of particular interest because effectiveness of conservation practices varies with the particular precipitation years used in its assessment. In this viewpoint, decade long precipitation variations and their relation to runoff and related conservation effects are briefly described. The magnitude of the resulting impacts on runoff is illustrated for the 770 km² Fort Cobb Reservoir watershed in central Oklahoma, and the significance of these precipitation variations for …