Precision Conservation for Riparian Systems to Maintain Balance Between Soil, Water, and Wildlife Conservation and Agricultural Production.

Conservation buffers are practical, cost-effective conservation practices which provide multiple environmental benefits. Strategically deployed conservation buffers produce environmental outcomes disproportionate to change in primary land use. Potential placement of buffers within a field, watershed, or landscape is constrained by practice eligibility criteria. However, optimal buffer placement will vary in relation to the specific resource concern. Precision conservation tools including LIDAR derived terrain models, land use/land cover, and nutrient/sediment transport models have been used to identify optimal buffer locations (Dosskey et al. 2011; Galzki et al. 2011; Saleh et al. 2011). Bentrup and Kellerman (2004) illustrated a geospatial approach for identifying optimal buffer placement to enhance biodiversity of riparian wildlife based on species-specific motility and connectivity. These data-informed approaches to practice placement will enhance the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of practices, but leave out the adoption-decision element. Conservation adoption is a multidimensional decision, influenced predominantly by time management, profit, and yields. Producers incur opportunity costs of practice adoption, yet these costs are rarely quantified and programmatic incentives are rarely based on true costs. McConnell and Burger (2011) described a geospatial decision support tool to guide producers and resource planners in making adoption decisions informed by profitability. Recent advances in precision agriculture technologies allow more sophisticated spatially-explicit profit determination to accurately characterize opportunity costs, better informing adoption decisions and structuring of practice incentives. Combining outcomes from nutrient/sediment transport, wildlife habitat value, and profitability in a multiple criteria decision support context would more fully realize the potential of precision conservation.