Targeting specific locations within agricultural watersheds for installing vegetative buffers has been advocated as a way to enhance the impact of buffers and buffer programs on stream water quality. Existing models for targeting buffers of Hortonian, or infiltration-excess, runoff are not well developed. The objective was to improve on an existing soil survey–based approach that would provide ...

Nonuniform field runoff can reduce the effectiveness of filter strips that are a uniform size along a field margin. Effectiveness can be improved by placing more filter strip where the runoff load is greater and less where the load is smaller. A modeling analysis was conducted of the relationship between pollutant trapping efficiency and the ratio of filter strip area to upslope contributing ar...

A P index was developed as a tool to rank agricultural fields on the basis of P loss vulnerability, helping to target remedial P management options within watersheds. We evaluated two approaches, a soil P threshold and components of a P index, by comparing site vulnerability estimates derived from these two approaches with measured runoff P losses in an agricultural watershed in Pennsylvania. R...

Phosphorus transport from agricultural soils contributes to eutrophication of fresh waters. Computer modeling can help identify agricultural areas with high potential P transport. Most models use a constant extraction coefficient (i.e., the slope of the linear regression between filterable reactive phosphorus [FRP] in runoff and soil P) to predict dissolved P release from soil to runoff, yet it...

The use of geographic information systems (GISs) and remote sensing to facilitate the estimation of runoff from watershed and agricultural fields has gained increasing attention in recent years. This is mainly due to the fact that rainfall-runoff models include both spatial and geomorphologic variations. The US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service Curve Number (USDA...

The Root Zone Water Quality Model (RZWQM) is a comprehensive, integrated physical, biological and chemical process model that simulates plant growth and movement of water, nutrients and pesticides in a representative area of an agricultural system. We tested the ability of RZWQM to predict surface runoff losses of atrazine, alachlor, fenamiphos and two fenamiphos oxidative degradates against re...

Agricultural practices such as cattle grazing and animal manure application can contribute to relatively high runoff concentrations of fecal coliform (FC) and fecal streptococcus (FS). Available information, however, is inconsistent with respect to the effects of such practices as well as to measures that can discriminate among candidate sources of FC and FS. The objective of this study was to ...

Multivariate hydrologic frequency analysis has been widely studied using: (1) commonly known joint distributions or copula functions with the assumption of univariate variables being independently identically distributed (I.I.D.) random variables; or (2) directly applying the entropy theory-based framework. However, for the I.I.D. univariate random variable assumption, the univariate variable m...

Spreading wood ash on forest and agricultural lands has been used for years to correct pH in acid soils and as a source of plant nutrients. However, it is necessary to enhance the knowledge of potential hazards derived from such a practise. Surface runoff pollution is one of these possible hazards. In this work we studied the quality of runoff water collected in two sloped forest plots before a...