Assessing the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework Toolbox in a Southern Piedmont landscape of the United States

This paper evaluates the applicability of the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF) for conservation planning in two Southern Piedmont (North Carolina) watersheds. The study compared ACPF-identified conservation practices to those recommended by local experts, finding that while ACPF primarily suggests practices designed for row crop landscapes (like contour buffer strips and grassed waterways), local experts emphasize soil health and pasture-related practices, the majority of which fall outside ACPF’s standard outputs. The results indicate that ACPF outputs do not fully align with local conservation priorities due to regional differences in land use, landscape structure, and management objectives; over 80% of the experts’ recommended practices were not included in ACPF’s scope. The authors suggest that adapting ACPF outputs through interpretation or “proxy” approaches can improve its relevance in non-Midwestern, pasture-dominated regions, although this requires significant local knowledge and additional geospatial data processing effort.