GIS mapping is helping to create effective management strategies to protect the environment.
By Alicia Bowland
Bayfield, Ontario, a waterfront community on gorgeous Lake Huron, is cottage country to some. But to others, it’s the home of the Gully Creek and Bayfield North watersheds, comprising 40 square kilometres of natural, recreational and agricultural land whose waterways drain into the lake.
And data is helping keep it pristine.
Watersheds—areas of land that drain water and snowmelt to rivers and lakes —are vital for supporting habitats and water conservation but can often collect harmful pollutants while draining. Watershed managers, researchers and farmers alike have long used the Gully Creek watershed to evaluate environmental and economic effects of land management practices.
Now, with new approaches to data analysis, testing these management practices has never been easier. On a 15-square-kilometre area of the Gully Creek watershed, researchers used a geographic information system (GIS) to create effective management strategies that minimize risk to the environment such as erosion and nutrient runoff, while optimizing economic returns for productive fields—popularly called beneficial management practices (BMPs).
Dr. Wanhong Yang, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph, created a GIS modelling tool that addresses the complexity of a typical watershed evaluation for BMPs, along with a user-friendly system developed for creating BMP scenarios and evaluating their effects and outcomes.
In Yang’s system, the user’s only role is to develop the land management scenarios. These scenarios are defined by BMP type and location from maps or tables. They include BMPs such as water and sediment control basins (WASCoBs), cover crops (crops grown to protect the ground from soil erosion), nutrient management and conservation tillage (reducing erosion by leaving previous crop residue on fields).
The system provides results using the managerial, geospatial, climate, flow, water quality and economic data that is already integrated into the model. This allows users to analyze the cost-effectiveness of these BMP scenarios through charts, tables, ratios and maps.
Currently, the system’s modules and their data are applicable only in specific geographic areas. But with the right expertise, they can be analyzed and applied to different areas.
“Conservation extension staff can take these kinds of results and provide insights and solutions that can apply to their geographies,” says Yang. “We hope to work this into the system in the future. The goal of our research is to take a complex computing system and make it practical for users to visualize factors and impacts that affect BMP decision-making.”
Yang’s system can also allow farmers to evaluate and assess which BMPs they can feasibly implement and how those practices may impact their processes and efficiency—a big step toward making sustainable agriculture more accessible for farmers and conservation extension staff alike.
This research was funded in part by the Ontario Agri-Food Alliance, a collaboration between the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs; University of Guelph; Canadian Water Network; Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.