Integrated Decision-making for Agricultural Engagement

Title: Building Resources for Integrated Decision-making for aGricultural Engagement (BRIDGE) 

Practice: Multi-objective

Location: Statewide

Time Period: 2025 - 2027

Research Team: Linda Shenk, Richard Cruse, Sara Winnike McMillan, Ethan Thies

Project Description: This project (BRIDGE) supports better integrated watershed-to-farm collaboration in Iowa’s Lake Panorama watershed in order to expand conservation practice adoption and improve local water quality. Located primarily an agricultural basin in Central Iowa, the Lake Panorama watershed drains into a recreational lake that experiences recurring water quality problems due to nutrient loss and sediment deposition from surrounding row-crop fields. 

The challenges this watershed faces are common across Iowa and the Midwest even though existing planning tools—such as the GIS-based Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF)—could help both watershed planners and farm decision-makers make effective and profitable decisions regarding conservation implementation. Such tools have remained underutilized, however, because researchers have neither sufficiently involved local conservation professionals in devising a useable process nor engaged farm decision-makers in the small-group and one-on-one interactions that support their autonomy as problem-solvers.

The BRIDGE team brings together a series of these planning tools—such as the ACPF and farm profitability tools—and then uses them with storytelling-based engagement strategies that allow farmer/landowners, conservation professionals, researchers to think with each other as collaborating experts. As outcomes, this project will host over 20 one-on-one/small group sessions with farm decision-makers to support conservation implementation in the watershed as well as create a participatory support matrix to share in other watershed contexts across the Midwest. 

Publications:

Funders: Iowa Nutrient Research Center, Iowa Water Center, Central Midwest COLEARN (a NOAA-funded CAP/RISA team)