Food
Environment
Trade
Risk
BiorenewablesWater Quality
Objective: To measure the effects of agricultural activities on water quality and to determine which policies are most effective in protecting watersheds and sources of drinking water, particularly in the Midwest.
Iowa Lakes Projects
Iowa Lakes Survey
The Iowa Lakes Web Site
This four-year project involves the gathering of use information as well as willingness-to-pay information for improvements in the water quality of Iowa's lakes. Data for the first year of the project has been gathered from a large sample of Iowa residents. These respondents will be re-surveyed over the next three years. This process will provide an extensive panel data set, which can be used to study the consequences of the spatial and temporal stability of parameters in revealed and stated preference demand models. This unique data set also will allow us to empirically implement and test models of the dynamic formation of willingness to pay with a specific focus on the value and consequences for willingness-to-pay values of improved water quality information.
Midwestern agriculture and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico
Map of the watershed
SWAT Riparian Zone Workshop presentations
This interdisciplinary project focuses on the role that agricultural activities have on hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Resource and Environmental Policy researches are working with the Grassland, Soil & Water Research Laboratory, USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Temple, Texas, to integrate the watershed-based Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model with economic models. This will allow us to estimate the economic and environmental impacts of alternative tillage, cropping, and nutrient management practices on water quality in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico.
Regional water quality trade-offs
We estimate econometrically a highly detailed spatial economic model that predicts whether farmers will adopt conservation tillage, and we integrate the economic model with a watershed-based water quality model. We then calculate the costs of alternative policies to promote reduced tillage and directly estimate the corresponding water quality benefits in local watersheds in the Upper Mississippi River Basin. We also compute the nitrogen loading associated with each policy to the Gulf of Mexico. This framework allows us to assess whether programs that target local water quality provide a "double dividend" in contributing to improved water quality at distant locations, or whether conflicts exist among policy designs.
Iowa Lakes Survey
The Iowa Lakes Web Site
This four-year project involves the gathering of use information as well as willingness-to-pay information for improvements in the water quality of Iowa's lakes. Data for the first year of the project has been gathered from a large sample of Iowa residents. These respondents will be re-surveyed over the next three years. This process will provide an extensive panel data set, which can be used to study the consequences of the spatial and temporal stability of parameters in revealed and stated preference demand models. This unique data set also will allow us to empirically implement and test models of the dynamic formation of willingness to pay with a specific focus on the value and consequences for willingness-to-pay values of improved water quality information.
Midwestern agriculture and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico
Map of the watershed
SWAT Riparian Zone Workshop presentations
This interdisciplinary project focuses on the role that agricultural activities have on hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Resource and Environmental Policy researches are working with the Grassland, Soil & Water Research Laboratory, USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Temple, Texas, to integrate the watershed-based Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model with economic models. This will allow us to estimate the economic and environmental impacts of alternative tillage, cropping, and nutrient management practices on water quality in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico.
Regional water quality trade-offs
We estimate econometrically a highly detailed spatial economic model that predicts whether farmers will adopt conservation tillage, and we integrate the economic model with a watershed-based water quality model. We then calculate the costs of alternative policies to promote reduced tillage and directly estimate the corresponding water quality benefits in local watersheds in the Upper Mississippi River Basin. We also compute the nitrogen loading associated with each policy to the Gulf of Mexico. This framework allows us to assess whether programs that target local water quality provide a "double dividend" in contributing to improved water quality at distant locations, or whether conflicts exist among policy designs.