Nutrient Management Tradeoffs and Targets

The CLEAN initiative aims to develop and demonstrate pragmatic and effective strategies for abating vulnerability to nutrient pollution in a socioeconomically viable manner. Identifying pragmatic nutrient controls within diverse sectors of a watershed system is a complex and multifaceted problem. Many, and often conflicting, environmental and socioeconomic factors must be taken into account when planning for nutrient management options. The need to balance vulnerability to nutrient pollution with cost of abatement within prevailing socioeconomic and institutional constraints provides a strong impetus for a multi-objective approach. This integration project presents a decision making framework to find solutions that are optimal at the system level.

Objectives

The overall goal of this project is to develop and demonstrate an integrative and adaptive framework for the development of system-level optimal strategies for targeted implementation of N and P load reduction options on a HUC 12 (or similar scale). The framework facilitates assessing tradeoffs and targets associated with different nutrient management solutions. A stakeholder-centered decision support dashboard based on multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is developed and demonstrated to create insight about sustainability of alternative solutions with a system view of nutrient management.

Contact Us

Neil Grigg
neil.grigg@colostate.edu
Mazdak Arabi
mazdak.arabi@colostate.edu