Water Quality Tradeoffs When Adopting Conservation Practices.

Conservation practices are adopted by land managers to limit the environmental footprint of agricultural practices. However, adoption of some practices may result in unintended consequences of creating or exacerbating other resource concerns. Adoption of practices intended to decrease sediment or total phosphorus loss is often successful; however, these practices can also exacerbate phosphorus problems by increasing highly bioavailable dissolved phosphorus. Many resource managers desire to saturate watersheds or regions with a single conservation practice. When this is done it will most often neglect the multiple pathways nutrients or other contaminants flow to water courses and may lead to unforeseen issues downstream or years later. In this presentation, the topic of conservation practices and water quality tradeoffs will be examined in depth, and a database of chiefly novel conservation practices will be presented that provides resource managers with the state-of-the science literature review of the topic.