Development of a Land Suitability Framework for Sustainable Manure Utilization

Abstract

HighlightsWe developed a land suitability framework for sustainable manure utilization based on seven water quality-related environmental vulnerability factors.ArcGIS-based decision-support tools were developed that use readily available data for the U.S.The tools can be adapted to any location in the U.S. for any livestock agricultural system.In a case study, 19.9% of the study area was identified as potentially suitable for manure utilization.2%, 33%, and 44% of the potential areas were highly, moderately, and marginally suitable, respectively.Abstract. Intensive livestock agriculture is a significant source of nutrient pollution that contributes to water quality degradation worldwide. This study presents a land suitability framework and accompanying decision-support tools for sustainable manure management. The developed framework identifies potentially suitable areas for manure application in a user-defined area and further classifies the land as highly suitable, moderately suitable, marginally suitable, and unsuitable using seven environmental vulnerability factors considering landscape biophysical characteristics and proximity to streams. The decision-support tools, built in ArcGIS, were applied in a case study in western Pennsylvania. The ArcGIS toolbox, available from ScholarSphere (https://doi.org/10.26207/99tk-sn24), classified 2% of the case study area as highly suitable for manure application and 21% as unsuitable. Landscape slope and proximity to streams were the dominant vulnerability factors in the case study area. The framework and accompanying tools are transferable across watershed boundaries and can help identify areas where environmentally sustainable animal agriculture can be developed. Keywords: Decision-support tool, Land suitability analysis, Sustainable manure management, Vulnerability analysis.

Toward a Robust Land Suitability Framework for Manure Management: Modeling Impacts and Evaluating Biophysical Characteristics

“…We used an uncalibrated SWAT model to compare inorganic and manure (organic) fertilization on nutrient loading in a case study watershed located in Western Pennsylvania, USA. The landscapes in the watershed were classified based on land suitability for manure application using LSF (Saha et al 2020), and the simulated nutrient loadings from these landscapes on manure application were compared to evaluate the robustness of the LSF. The nutrient simulations and landscape biophysical characteristics were analyzed under a decision-tree approach to identify major biophysical characteristics contributing to nutrient loss vulnerability after manure application.…”

“…The SWAT model requires topography, land use, soil, weather, and management information as inputs. Detailed information about the input data can be found in Saha et al (2020). Briefly, we used U.S. Geological Survey Digital Elevation Model data of 10-m resolution (https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/) to delineate the watershed boundary and landscape slopes.…”

“…The manureshed concept for sustainable manure management has been proposed recently to improve the circularity of manure nutrients in the system by connecting manure sources with manure demand areas (Saha et al 2018;Spiegal et al 2020). In a previous study (Saha et al 2020), we proposed a land suitability framework (LSF) for helping farm owners and policymakers identify suitable areas for sustainable manure application.…”

“…The framework considered seven environmental vulnerability factors with vulnerability indices such as Nitrogen (N) Leaching Index (LI) (Pierce et al 1991;Williams and Kissel 1991) and Pennsylvania phosphorus (P) Index representing the land's potential to lose applied manure nutrients via leaching and surface runoff, respectively (Shaffer and Delgado 2002;Sharpley et al 2017). A detailed assessment of nutrient loss from manure application is required to evaluate the potential of manure as the right nutrient source and the effectiveness of the LSF (Saha et al 2018(Saha et al , 2020. Quantitative estimates of nutrient loss from various landscapes also provide opportunities to design sustainable livestock systems with optimal manure utilization and implement circular nutrient conceptbased agricultural systems (Meinen et al 2022).…”

“…In general, the critical or suitable area assessments consider biophysical or environmental vulnerability factors individually and aggregate them into a combined suitability index. Previous studies followed several approaches, including a mathematical modeling approach (Mudgal et al 2012), empirical approach (Lemunyon and Gilbert 1993), simple rulebased approach (Saha et al 2020), or fuzzy rulebased approach (Feng et al 2015) to calculate the suitability index. In most of these cases, a vulnerability factor or even a biophysical characteristic dominates the suitability classification of an area.…”