LEAP - Legacies of Agricultural Pollutants

LEAP aims to develop a unified framework that explicitly incorporates agricultural nutrient legacies and time lags into adaptive management strategies to protect water resources under changing climate and land use. The research will integrate the following three components:

  • Biophysical: LEAP will fill key knowledge gaps and develop watershed-scale nutrient modelling tools necessary to determining impacts of historical land-use patterns on current nutrient loading to surface and groundwater.
  • Economic: LEAP will account for trade-offs between initial costs of BMP implementation and delayed benefits of water quality improvements by evaluating appropriate discounting methods.
  • Policy: by quantifying nutrient legacies and associated lag times, LEAP will help select appropriate (site-specific) BMPs and establish nutrient reduction goals within realistic time frames

Description

Widespread nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertiliser use threatens water quality and aquatic ecosystems. Agricultural best management practices (BMPs) have been implemented in an attempt to improve water quality, but time lags between BMP implementation and measurable water quality benefits are frequently observed. One reason is the slow release of N and P from legacy nutrient stores that accumulated in the landscape over decades of fertiliser application. At present, we continue to lack: (a) a comprehensive characterisation of the nature, size and reactivity of agricultural N and P legacies, (b) integrated modelling tools to predict the timing and magnitude of water quality improvements achievable through BMPs, and (c) policy instruments that acknowledge time lags and balance trade-offs between short and long-term costs, benefits and risks.
LEAP aims to gain a predictive understanding of the release of nutrients over time and how they move and transform within water systems and address the knowledge gaps. The project objectives are:

  • Identify key controls on the accumulation and mobilisation of agricultural N and P legacies, and predict time lags between implementation of BMPs and reductions in nutrient loadings to ground and surface waters, as a function of climate, land cover, land use, and land management;
  • Assess outcomes of alternative management strategies by performing cost-benefit analyses within a hydro-economic modelling framework that explicitly represents nutrient legacies;
  • Develop a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) framework to evaluate uncertainties in both biophysical and hydro-economic modelling of nutrient legacies, and assess their implications for nutrient risk management;
  • Create an agro-ecosystem typology – based on EU and Canadian exemplars– that links biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of non-point source pollution to water quality impacts; and
  • Inform adaptive agro-environmental water management practices that target mitigation of water quality impacts of N and P legacies by assessing trade-offs between short and long-term costs, benefits and risks.

Read more

Legacies of Agricultural Pollutants
Reconciling Agriculture and Water Quality

IFRO Project coordinator

Søren Bøye Olsen

IFRO Project participants

Anne Kejser Jensen and Brian H. Jacobsen

Project Organisation

Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen

Project Partners and Institution

Jerker Jarsjö, Stockholm University
Søren Bøye Olsen, University of Copenhagen
Maria Cunha, University of Coimbra
Nandita Basu, University of Waterloo

Period

April 2017 - April 2020

Financing source

The 2016 Joint Call is funded under WaterWorks2015, which is supported by the European Commission (EC). WaterWorks2015 aims at tackling water challenges at European and international levels through the development of transnational and transdisciplinary research and innovation actions.

WATER JPI are intergovernmental initiatives aiming at strengthening European leadership and competitiveness in Research Development and Innovation, while at the same time harmonizing and mobilizing National and Regional RDI Programs. In Denmark the funding comes from the Danish Innovation Fund.

Amount

Total: DKK 12,2 million
IFRO share: DKK 3,0 million