Evaluating Nutrient Tracking Tool and simulated conservation practices

Excerpt

The Nutrient Tracking Tool (NTT) is an enhanced version of the Nitrogen Trading Tool, an earlier model that was developed by the USDA. NTT provides farmers, government officials, researchers, and others an efficient, web-based, and user-friendly method of evaluating the impacts of proposed and existing conservation practices (CPs) on water quality and quantity. In addition to cultural or nonstructural practices (e.g., nutrient management), commonly used structural CPs, such as filter strips, grassed waterways, cattle exclusion, terraces, and wetlands, can be evaluated in NTT with a few key strokes after selecting the user's field of interest. NTT estimates the impacts of each practice, or combination of practices, on sediment losses, nutrient losses, and runoff, as well as farm production indicators such as crop yield. Through its interface with the Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender (APEX) model (Williams and Izaurralde 2005), NTT simulates all CPs using rigorous algorithms while providing the user with a simple interface to access the results. The current and previous versions of NTT are available to users at the “Welcome” screen of the NTT website (http://nn.tarleton.edu/ntt).

NTT was developed by linking APEX to its interface. APEX is thus the core simulation model of NTT and is an augmented version…