The Center has expanded the scope of peer-reviewed studies included in the Agricultural BMP Database. The Agricultural BMP Database is a long-term collaborative effort of the Water Research Foundation, the National Corn Growers Association and the United Soybean Board that provides a central repository of scientifically-based information on the effectiveness of individual BMPs for reducing sediment and nutrient pollution from agricultural sites. The long-term goal of the database is to provide agricultural planners, consultants, and producers with information that enables them to better select BMPs for their operations and to support improvements in agricultural BMP design and implementation.
The work focused on finding and adding new studies from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the Upper Midwest regions to the database. The Center worked with the University of Illinois to contact researchers and review a total of 102 studies. Of these, 20 met the criteria for inclusion in the database and data entry spreadsheets were compiled for 16 studies.
The addition of new studies to the Agricultural BMP Database will increase its utility for future research by allowing for more rigorous statistical comparisons. Such comparisons can help to identify potential causes of regional differences in BMP effectiveness. Researchers can submit new studies to the database using the data entry spreadsheet provided at the Agricultural BMP Database Portal.
Read the final project report here: https://owl.cwp.org/mdocs-posts/finding-and-adding-agricultural-bmp-performance-studies-to-the-agricultural-bmp-database/
This project was funded by the Water Research Foundation (Project No. STAR-N6R14/4857). For more information about this project, contact Bill Stack at bps@cwp.org.
