The Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF) is a concept for agricultural watershed management supported by high-resolution data and an ArcGIS toolbox to identify site-specific opportunities for installing conservation practices across small watersheds. This non-prescriptive approach provides a menu of conservation options to facilitate conservation discussions on farms and in community halls. The framework combines local expertise on resource concerns, landscape features, and producer preferences to clarify the range of options for watershed conservation planning.
The Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework consists of three main components:
- Framework: The ACPF Framework is based on a sequence of conservation priorities, ranging from in-field to edge-of-stream practices, which, in combination, can enhance watershed health.
- Core Data: The Core Data can be initiated for more than 50,000 agricultural HUC12 watersheds across the U.S., providing a consistent, low-cost foundation for conservation analysis.
- ArcGIS Toolbox: The ACPF ArcGIS Toolbox is specifically designed for Esri’s ArcGIS Pro software, utilizing core watershed databases and high-resolution topographic data to generate detailed output maps that identify a wide range of potential conservation practice opportunities.
The Watershed Approach
The small watershed approach emphasizes collaborative conservation planning at the subwatershed scale, typically 10,000 to 40,000 acres or a HUC12 unit. Unlike farm-by-farm or broad-scale watershed strategies, this approach targets intermediate-scale implementation, but can be integrated with both smaller and larger conservation efforts.
The HUC12 watershed is an effective scale for identifying and prioritizing projects, engaging local stakeholders, and understanding the hydrologic processes and project impacts. Even when working with individual landowners, the watershed approach helps conservationists address farm-scale issues in the context of the upstream and downstream implications of a project.
The ACPF supports this watershed approach by analyzing hydrology at an actionable scale and generating a broad range of specific conservation practices that can be installed at the field level. This landscape-specific information gives landowners the ability and confidence to decide what actions are most effective in addressing local water quality and quantity concerns on their land.
The watershed approach involves engaging diverse stakeholders who have a variety of skills and interests to identify problems and potential solutions. The ACPF, used in combination with a systems-thinking approach, is important for understanding the community’s capacity for addressing water issues and for understanding the hydrology to identify and prioritize key pollutant sources and transport.
The ACPF Conservation Pyramid
The ACPF conceptual framework is based on the conservation pyramid, which emphasizes soil conservation as the foundation to agricultural watershed management.
Well-managed soils lose less water to runoff and leaching, which improves production and enables additional practices to effectively treat losses that occur due to the natural ‘leakiness’ of agricultural lands. These additional practices, which control water flows and trap and treat nutrient losses, can be implemented or stacked in fields, at field edges, and in riparian zones.
The ACPF framework identifies locations where specific landscape attributes are favorable for implementing certain conservation practices and includes methods to help prioritize these locations according to their susceptibility to runoff and erosion.
Looking for more information on 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.
Tomer, M. D., Porter, S. A., James, D. E., Boomer, K. M., 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(5), 113A-120A.
