Optimizing Spatial Allocation of BMPs for a Sustainable Food Energy Water Nexus.

The Food Energy Water (FEW) Nexus is currently managed in an unsustainable fashion. In Midwestern US agricultural watersheds, the FEW Nexus is severely unbalanced, leading to soil and water quality degradation, as well as loss of habitat.  To rebalance the FEW Nexus in this region,  a spatial decision support tool involving collaborative geodesign was developed and tested in Seven Mile Creek watershed, Minnesota.  The geodesign tool consists of a GIS based user interface residing on a large touch screen, that allows watershed stakeholders to explore the impacts on the FEW Nexus of various scenarios for farm management that differ from the current baseline practices.  Driving the geodesign tool is an extensive database of alternative farm management practices tied to specific locations in the watershed.  The database was developed by simulating each alternative management practice at each site using the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) with a long climatic record.  The impacts of each management practice on crop productivity, sediment and phosphorus loss, carbon sequestration and terrestrial bird habitat are modeled at both the local hydrologic response unit and the broader watershed reach scales.  Stakeholders have successfully used the geodesign tool to select alternative practices that improve the delivery of ecosystem services in the watershed.  Spatial optimization of alternative practices with linear programming techniques has been used in parallel with stakeholder designs to optimize ecosystem services for a given level of investment.  Comparison between stakeholder designs and spatially optimized designs shows that the latter provide greater ecosystem services than the former.  However, the former produces landscape designs that are more practical to implement, because of greater spatial continuity and clustering than in the spatially optimized designs.