News Drainage Management Systems
Novel tool informs land use and nutrient control in troubled waters

In watersheds degraded by runoff of nutrients from farmland, land managers struggle to pinpoint the best locations to install riparian buffer strips along streams or other pollution-reduction practices, but a new technology devised by Penn State scientists promises to make the search for those sites easier and less expensive.

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers in the College of Agricultural Sciences has developed a computer model that can simulate the underground and overland movement of water—and, consequently, that of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus or pollutants—in entire watersheds with far greater spatial resolution than previous hydrologic models. | READ MORE