Phosphorus Export and Delivery in Agricultural Landscapes 2 (PEDAL 2)
Cost:
Duration:
Project Overview
Project Details
People and Institutions
Results and Applications
Publications
Latest Updates
Overview
To meet Water Framework Directive (WFD) responsibilities there is a need to estimate the likely effect of current and future policies on agricultural land-use and land management and subsequently on the quality of receiving waters in agricultural catchments. Additionally, where targeted mitigation measures are required to reduce diffuse water pollution from agriculture there is a need to estimate the most effective strategies. These strategies include establishing and implementing programs of measures (POMs) within river basin districts and identification of Water Protection Zones where restrictions on activities resulting in pollution of watercourses may be restricted by law. Programs of measures aimed at reducing pollution may be site-specific or local/regional, more generally applied through cross-compliance, meeting codes of good agricultural practice or through environmental stewardship schemes via the Entry Level Scheme or in some circumstances through the restricted number of Higher Level Schemes in important areas such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. In all of these schemes it is important to assess likely efficacy and practicality. Owing to uncertainties in our ability to predict the effects of the many interacting processes at appropriate scales (e.g. farm and small catchment), these estimates are not an exact science. This has led organisations such as the Environment Agency to employ risk-based decision making strategies where confidence in predictions is taken into account.
These types of approach recognise that making decisions using single-value estimates, that are known to be inaccurate, does not help policy makers understand the likelihood of being wrong and how the risk of being wrong may vary spatially. The framework proposed here will be established so that uncertainties in our knowledge and available information are propagated through the system to give more robust estimates. This will be achieved by using fuzzy information and fuzzy rules of catchment and farming system function (fuzzy mathematical techniques are useful for dealing with imprecise data and knowledge where a range of outcomes are possible). Without consideration of our current abilities to estimate the behaviour of diffuse pollutants, determination of diffuse pollution mitigation measure effectiveness, and hence cost-effectiveness, can be misleading.