Development
and Evaluation of an Agricultural
Chemical Fate Modeling System Using GIS
College of
Natural Resources
February 21, 2001
Mission
The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a
coupled system made up of a Geographic Information System (GIS) and an
agricultural chemical simulation model. This
system is intended to provide the ability to spatially model runoff and leaching
of agricultural chemicals such as pesticides and nitrogen.
This tool would provide a robust capability for modeling potential future
impacts to surface and groundwater from agricultural activity.
Project Summary
Two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin
Stevens Point have developed a system that couples together an agricultural
chemical simulation model with ArcView, which is a popular GIS software package.
This system couples ESRI’s ArcView 3.2 and a created Visual Basic
software package with a popular chemical fate model called Pesticide Root Zone
Model (PRZM3) for spatial modeling of pesticide and nitrate movement. The system
includes the development of graphical user interfaces (GUI) using Visual Basic
to simplify the entering of model input data as well as for linking to chemical,
crop, and soil databases. The users can run a single simulation for
site-specific research or multiple simulations to conduct research on a regional
scale. We call this part of the system Visual PRZM3.
Visual PRZM3 is then coupled with ArcView to form an
extension called ArcPRZM3, which provides an efficient way of simulating
agricultural chemical fate at various scales. Customized tools in ArcView have
been developed for deriving spatially dependent variables from soils, digital
elevation models (DEM), and land cover themes. The soil database is produced
from the Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO). Graphical user interfaces and tools have been developed using
Avenue programming in ArcView. These interfaces and tools allow for simple
processing of model outputs and subsequent representation in the form of tables,
charts, and maps.
Arc PRZM3 is currently in its beta version and is under
review by users from several agencies. Any
other potentially interested parties are welcome to contact any of the
researchers who are listed below. The software, documentation, and example data can be provided.
Research
One graduate student at UWSP is using Arc PRZM3 to
predict pesticides contamination for the ground water in the Arkansas Delta. The
Mississippi Delta Region of eastern Arkansas (the Arkansas Delta) is one of most
famous regions of United States for agricultural production. Due to its high
agricultural production, fertilizers and pesticides are used extensively, which
has posed a potential threat to ground water in that region. The simulation
results from Arc PRZM3 will be compared with the well data for pesticides and
nitrates. This application will help us to check the capability and accuracy of
the system.
A
second student is using the system to make predictions of nitrate and pesticide
leaching for several sites at an agricultural research station in Columbia
County, Wisconsin. Simulations will
be carried out using SSURGO data and detailed site-specific soil data.
The simulation results will be compared with one and another and to
actual leaching data that was collected in 1997-98. This comparison will give us a good idea of how useful the
SSURGO database and the Arc PRZM3 system will be for conducting vulnerability
assessments in regards to contamination by agricultural chemicals.
A vulnerability assessment for Dane County, Wisconsin will also be
carried out using ArcPRZM3.
Contact
Information
|
Dr.
Hangsheng Lin, hlin@uwsp.edu |
Tahir Ali Akbar |
John
DeGroote, |