Geomaticians

New Conservation Planning Tool Allows Users To Evaluate Tailored Cost-benefit Tradeoffs

New Conservation Planning Tool Allows Users To Evaluate Tailored Cost-benefit Tradeoffs
Conservation planning is entering a new era of precision problem-solving with the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF), and its just-released Financial and Nutrient Reduction Tool (FiNRT). “ACPF itself is a non-prescriptive conservation planning framework supported by high-resolution geospatial data and an ArcGIS toolbox,” said Emily Zimmerman, assistant professor in Iowa State’s Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management. “These elements are used to allow conservation planners and landowners to identify and evaluate conservation opportunities at different scales, from the field to the watershed.” FiNRT was introduced in a recent article in the “Journal of Environmental Quality,” authored by Emma Bravard, a research scientist at Iowa State, Zimmerman, Tyndall and David James, now retired from the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). Other partners on FiNRT included the ACPF National Hub hosted by the Iowa Water Center at Iowa State, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin.