Excerpt
Water quality monitoring is used throughout the world to assess the quality of water resources. Data and analyses from assessments can be used to inform policy as well as program design, delivery approaches, practice design, and adaptive management to enhance outcomes. Many of these assessments have demonstrated problems associated with nutrient enrichment and sedimentation of water resources (Chapman 1996; Dubrovsky and Hamilton 2010; Scott and Gemmell 2013). Not surprisingly, because of its land area and necessary inputs to support food production services, agriculture can be a major source of nutrients and sediment (USEPA 2008), contributing to the impairment of water resources across the globe. Key water quality monitoring programs to document large-scale water quality status or trends exist. These are useful for tracking changes in water resource condition and trends over time in basins or large water bodies, but are often not fine enough resolution alone to attribute effects to specific actions or understand the processes occurring or being influenced by management.
Water quality monitoring can also be used to document the effectiveness of agricultural conservation practices at both the field and watershed scale. There is a significant body of edge-of-field and plot research documenting reductions from diverse practices ranging…
- © 2018 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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