Joint prioritization of best-management-practice projects to optimally improve agricultural-drain-outlet water quality

摘要: The judicious application of conservation funds to mitigate non-point source pollution from agricultural runoff continues to be a practical challenge, particularly when presented with multiple feasible types of best-management-practices. To address this challenge, we develop and demonstrate a joint prioritization of two best-management-practice types that are commonly implemented to reduce pollutant loads from agricultural activities: irrigation-system-efficiency-upgrades and sediment-retention-basins. The goal of the joint prioritization is to optimally apply conservation funds to maximize pollutant-load reductions at agricultural-drain outlets. We achieve large computational efficiencies in the joint prioritization by leveraging a novel, graph-based mixed-integer-nonlinear-programming model. The computational efficiencies allow the approach to be applied as a large-scale scoping analysis to identify sets of high …