Do Randomly Placed Riparian Conservation Land-Uses Improve Stream Water Quality in Iowa, USA?
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Abstract
To improve stream water quality in the United States, government programs subsidize farmers to establish riparian conservation land-uses in agricultural landscapes. This study compared sediment and phosphorus water concentrations from stream reaches adjacent to riparian forest buffers, grass filters, row-cropped fields, pastures with cattle fenced out of the stream, and continuous, rotational and intensive rotational pastures in Iowa. In some cases agricultural land-uses had significantly higher sediment and phosphorus concentrations, while in others the conservation land-uses were higher. The few significant differences between conservation and agricultural land-uses suggest that the random placement of conservation land-uses is an inefficient way to improve water quality.
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This article is from Polish Journal of Environmental Studies 20 (2011): 1083. Posted with permission.