Resource Library - Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework

This resource library highlights some of the key ACPF resources. Looking for additional resources you don’t see on this page? Reach out to the ACPF forum to connect with fellow APCF users. ACPF users are often the most important resource for more information!

New to ACPF? Check out the ACPF Summary Factsheet for an overview of how watershed coordinators can use ACPF and what is needed to run the toolbox.

Past Webinars

The Minnesota Water Resources Center hosted an Informational Webinar on ACPF on November 4th, 2019. The webinar overviewed how ACPF can help individuals working in a watershed context determine conservation solutions at the field scale, engage diverse stakeholders in the watershed planning process, and determine which sub-watershed to focus on and which landowners to engage. Attendees also heard how the ACPF compares to other watershed planning tools commonly used in Minnesota like PTMapp and HSPF-SAM to help you determine which tools will best serve your needs. Learn more

Examples of ACPF in Use

The ACPF Training and Outreach team put together a series of ACPF use examples to demonstrate how ACPF has been used in the watershed planning process in different watersheds throughout the region. The watersheds are the Buckeye Creek watershed in Southeast Iowa, the Root River watershed in Southeast Minnesota, and the Beargrass Creek watershed in Indiana.
The Southfork Watershed Alliance is a group of individuals who are working together to improve their understanding, and implementation of, conservation practices that can be used to improve water quality and soil health. This story map was created to help the Southfork Watershed Alliance interpret APCF output maps of the South Fork watershed and determine how the solutions identified fit into their conservation goals. Conservation practice placement opportunities are categorized under four response management concerns: runoff and erosion control, water detention and storage, tile drainage treatments and riparian management. Individual producers in the South Fork watershed can create their own conservation story through the map by finding and exploring ACPF results for their farm fields.
The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy created this story map to tell the story of their work in the Elm Creek Watershed to target agricultural best management practices for water quality.
Prairie Rivers of Iowa is using ACPF to identify opportunities for bioreactors in the Squaw Creek Watershed Management Plan. This blog by Dan Haug overviews how they used ACPF to help reach their goals.
Missouri NRCS created a story map outlining the conservation placement process in the East Locust Creek Watershed in North Central Missouri, including their use of ACPF to assess opportunities for source water protection.

Other Resources

Colleagues at the University of Minnesota Water Resources Center, with support from USDA NRCS, recently developed a guide for making landscape-specific adaptations to the ACPF. This guide helps users take advantage of the flexibility built into the ACPF toolbox and develop meaningful strategies within the targeted subwatershed using the ACPF toolbox BMP siting outputs.
Using the ACPF Utilities Suite you can create your own ACPF database complete with watershed boundaries, field boundaries, elevation, soils and land use data and run the ACPF tools anywhere in the conterminous United States – even if land and soils data is not provided by the ACPF team. To create your own geodatabase, watch Lecture 29 in the ACPF training videos or check out our newly developed Story Map. Both resources take you step by step through using the ACPF Utilities Suite within ACPF Version 3 to create your own ACPF geodatabase.

ACPF Publications

The ACPF team and other partners have published a number of peer-reviewed articles on the ACPF planning concept, the toolbox, the riparian mapping system, the use on ACPF on the ground. The ACPF has also been used to answer other research questions. Explore the publications:

Church, S.P., Babin, N., Bentlage, B., Dunn, M., Ulrich-Schad, J.D., Ranjan, P., Magner, J., McLellan, E., Stephan, S., Tomer, M.D., Propoky, L.S. (2019) The Beargrass Story: Utilizing Social Science to Evaluate and Learn from the “Watershed Approach” The Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 167, 78-96.
McLellan, E.L., Schilling, K.E., Wolter, C.F., Tomer, M.D., Porter, S.A., Magner, J.A., Smith, D.R., & Prokopy, L.S. (2018) Right pratice, right place: A conservation planning toolbox for meeting water quality goals in the Corn Belt. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. 73(2), 29A-34A.
Ranjan, P., Singh, A.S., Tomer, M.D., Lewandowski, A.M., & Prokopy, L.S. (2019) Lessons learned from using a decision-support tool for precision placement of conservation practices in six agricultural watersheds in the US Midwest.Journal of Environmental Management, 239, 57-65.
Rundhaug, T.J., Geimer, G.R., Drake, C.W., Arenas Amado, A., Bradley, A.A., Wolter, C.F., & Weber, L.J. (2018) Agricultural conservation practices in Iowa watersheds: Comparing actual implementation with practice potential. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 190: 659
Srinivas, R., Drewitz, M., Magner, J. (2020) Evaluating watershed-based optimized decision support framework for conservation practice placement in the Plum Creek Minnesota. Journal of Hydrology, 583: 124573.
Tomer, M.D., Porter, S.A., Boomer K.M.B., James, D.E., Kostel, J.A., Helmers, M.J., Isenhart, T.M. & McLellan, E. (2015) Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework: 1. Developing Multipractice Watershed Planning Scenarios and Assessing Nutrient Reduction Potential Journal of Environmental Quality. 44(3),754-767
Tomer, M.D., Boomer, K.M.B., Porter, S.A., Gelder, B.K., James, D.E. & McLellan, E. (2015) Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework: 2. Classification of Riparian Buffer Design Types with Application to Assess and Map Stream Corridors. Journal of Environmental Quality. 44(3), 768-779
Tomer, M.D., James, D.E. & Sandoval-Green, C.M.J. (2017) Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework: 3. Land use and field boundary database development and structure. Journal of Environmental Quality. 46(3), 676-686.
Tomer, M.D., Porter, S.A., James, D.E., Boomer, K.M.B., Kostel, J.A. & McLellan, E. (2013) Combining precision conservation technologies into a flexible framework to facilitate agricultural watershed planning. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. 68, 113A-120A.