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Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF) Toolbox

Metadata Updated: April 21, 2025

Spatial data on soils, land use, and topography combined with knowledge of conservation effectiveness can be used to reduce nutrient discharge from small watersheds. The Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF) Toolbox software includes tools to process the LiDAR-based digital elevation models for hydrologic analysis, which then allows a series of prioritization, riparian classification, and conservation-practice placement tools to be used. These toolsets identify agricultural fields most prone to deliver runoff directly to streams, map and classify riparian zones to inform whole-watershed riparian corridor management, and estimate the extent of tile drainage in the watershed. The software maps out suites of locations appropriate to install each of several types of conservation practices. These practice-placement opportunities are mapped for practices including controlled drainage, grassed waterways, water and sediment control basins, and nutrient removal wetlands. Rather than making any recommendations, ACPF provides an inventory of watershed assessment data and conservation placement opportunities across a watershed, in order to inform local watershed planning. ACPF software runs as an extension to ArcGIS software (ver 10.2 or higher) and requires the customized ACPF spatial databases that include agricultural field boundaries and land uses, key soil survey information, and LiDAR based elevation data that are all tied to the Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) 12 watershed scale. Resources in this dataset:Resource Title: ACPF Watershed Planning Tool Informational Web Site . File Name: Web Page, url: http://northcentralwater.org/acpf/ This related resource, called "A Framework to Facilitate Conservation Planning in Agricultural Watersheds Using Precision GIS-based Technologies," is a web page describing the watershed planning framework. Conceptually, our framework is based on a “Conservation Pyramid” (Figure 1) that emphasizes soil conservation as the foundation to agricultural watershed management. Our planning framework (Figure 2) identifies locations where specific landscape attributes are favorable for installation of each type of practice, and includes methods to prioritize locations according to susceptibility to runoff and erosion losses.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date March 30, 2024
Metadata Updated Date April 21, 2025
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from USDA JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date March 30, 2024
Metadata Updated Date April 21, 2025
Publisher Agricultural Research Service
Maintainer
Identifier 10.15482/USDA.ADC/1171155
Data Last Modified 2024-02-08
Public Access Level public
Data Update Frequency irregular
Bureau Code 005:18
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 25da1162-4f38-41c3-957e-186ee7d6dcbb
Harvest Source Id d3fafa34-0cb9-48f1-ab1d-5b5fdc783806
Harvest Source Title USDA JSON
License https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html
Program Code 005:040
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 46bec6cc19e43e6eac12f026e42705792f1503f1e3199dea629a00fbf455920c
Source Schema Version 1.1

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