This agreement responds to a growing need for metrics that can be used to track conservation and restoration activities on public and private lands and improve the ability to the contribution of…

This agreement responds to a growing need for metrics that can be used to track conservation and restoration activities on public and private lands and improve the ability to the contribution of natural and working lands to the nation's conservation goals. IT will aid federal decision makers in natural resource management and prioritization of investments. This project is an extension of work completed under a previous OCE-tiaer agreement for integration of the farm economic model into NTT as well as continued apex parameterization and enhancement and application of the nutrient tracking tool (NTT) to support water quality trading markets. The nutrient tracking tool (NTT) is a user-friendly web-based interface developed by the texas institute for applied environmental science (tiaer) with support from the US department of agriculture (USDA) office of the chief economist (OCE), natural resources conservation service (nrcs) and agriculture research service (ARS) staff. In effect, NTT provides a user-friendly interface to the agricultural policy extender (apex) model which can estimate yields and sediment and nutrient losses at the farm level based on user-specified crop rotation and management information as well as site specific soil and weather data. The purpose of this project is five-fold. First, develop a county-level of NTT that uses lookup tables to allow a fast and easy way for users to assess potential n, p and sediment loss values based on minimum information. Second, continue to improve NTT by allowing users the option of managing phosphorus on their fields to a given level. Third, continue parameterization of apex for the various regions of the country using field-level data. Fourth, continue to support tiaer's efforts to work with CSU to develop, test and roll-out the comet water quality component which uses tiaer's NTT API finally continue support for general NTT operations and maintenance