Predicting the durability of expired fields in the Conservation Reserve Program: Can we measure enduring benefits of the program from afar?

Keywords: agriculture, remote sensing, Conservation Reserve Program, land cover change, ecosystem benefits
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 78

Abstract

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has allocated funds to private landowners in exchange for implementation of conservation practices since 1985. Initially, the CRP targeted marginal cropland for soil conservation, however, it has since been recognized for provision of additional benefits such as water quality, erosion control, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration. However, land tenure in the CRP program fluctuates and there is little information on the environmental services provided by these fields after the CRP contract expires. Our goal is to assess the enduring environmental benefits of conservation practices on expired CRP lands in agroecosystems across the Great Plains.

We conducted edge-of-field surveys of expired CRP fields on 1,089 fields across 14 states to determine if a field remained in conservation cover (i.e., durable CRP benefits) or returned to cultivated agriculture. We used our data to develop a random forest model using a combination of Landsat-derived phenological variables in Google Earth Engine and national level cropland data to estimate the probability of a field durability.

Our model, which incorporated the USDA Cropland Data Layer, had an overall accuracy of 88% and an F1 score of 0.89 and showed little bias across Level III ecoregion types. We then used this model to predict the status of a field each year after the CRP contract expired to estimate the rate of durability. We will present results on this phase of the project with respect to conservation practices and ecoregions.