A web-based GIS Decision Support System for managing and planning USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is one of the largest programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at encouraging farmers and ranchers to address soil, water, and related natural resource issues on their lands in an environmentally sustainable manner. This paper outlines the design and development of a prototype web-GIS Decision Support System (DSS), CRP-DSS, for use in resource management and assessment of environmental quality. Specifically, the DSS is targeted toward aiding USDA to better manage and plan CRP enrollments. The DSS is based on the emerging industry-standard ArcIMS GIS platform and integrates a mapping component AFIRS (Automated Feature Information Retrieval System) and a modeling component SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool). Our novel integrated web-GIS DSS is implemented using web server and Java Servlet technology over an ArcIMS platform to support data access and processing in a distributed environment. AFIRS functions as a feature extraction protocol that uses multisource geospatial data sets and SWAT serves to simulate longterm trends of soil and water quality. The prototype DSS was applied to simulate the sediment and nutrient dynamics of a small watershed in the Oklahoma Panhandle. We intend to develop the prototype CRP-DSS into a full-fledged tool geared to enable USDA better manage and plan future CRP enrollments.