Excerpt
With limited resources available, how should conservation professionals deal with the increasing demands for soil and water conservation? Berry et al. (2003) introduced precision conservation as a concept and tool to improve resource management efficiency and enhance environmental sustainability. Given substantial advances in geospatial technologies and information technologies and readily available spatial and temporal information on natural resources, land owners, resource managers, farmers, and extension personnel would better understand the economic and environmental consequences of land use and management practices so that site-specific actions can be taken to mitigate and reduce those negative environmental impacts. Consistent with the concept of precision conservation, Qiu et al. (2007) proposed to re-conceptualize nonpoint source pollution as “variable source pollution” by introducing John Hewlett's variable source area (VSA) hydrology into water resources and watershed management practices. According to the VSA hydrology, runoff that carries pollutants and contributes to stream hydrograph is primarily generated in relatively small, but predictable, hydrologically sensitive areas (HSAs) in a landscape where soils are saturated. Managing variable area pollution recognizes the close, dynamic, and most frequently complicated interactions between land and water in landscape and requires that conservation and resource management efforts focus on relatively small HSAs. Without using the…
Footnotes
Zeyuan Qiu is associate professor at the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey.
- © 2010 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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