Excerpt
Vegetated agricultural buffers are permanently vegetated areas that separate cropland from water bodies. At their simplest, buffers may be a strip of seeded forage separating field and stream, but they may also be more complex plantings of sequences of species, including grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees. Natural vegetation can also serve as a buffer.
Buffers have many benefits. They act as filters for sediment and sediment-bound nutrients in runoff from cultivated fields. They provide a zone of infiltration for runoff in which dissolved nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) can enter the soil profile and subsequently be taken up by plants (Correll 1997). Buffers also provide a physical separation between agricultural activities, such as tillage and spraying, and water bodies (Wolf et al. 2005). Buffers are also effective habitat, both in themselves and as contributors to instream habitat conditions.
In Canada, establishment of buffer strips between cropped land and water bodies, particularly streams, is an accepted Best/Beneficial Management Practice (BMP) and has been subsidized under incentive-based, environmental programming (AEFP 2007). In the prairie provinces of western Canada, buffers have been promoted primarily as a means of protecting water quality in a largely agricultural region with inherently eutrophic water bodies and high…
- © 2011 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society