Riparian buffer

It plays a key role in increasing water quality in associated streams, rivers, and lakes, thus providing environmental benefits.

With the decline of many aquatic ecosystems due to agriculture, riparian buffers have become a very common conservation practice aimed at increasing water quality and reducing pollution.

Large scale results have demonstrated that the expansion of riparian buffers through the deployment of plantations systems can effectively reduce nitrogen emissions to water and soil loss by wind erosion, while simultaneously providing substantial environmental co-benefits, having limited negative effects on current agricultural production.

Designing buffer zones based on their hydrological function instead of a traditionally used fixed width method, can be economically beneficial in forestry practices.

[4] A riparian buffer is usually split into three different zones, each having its own specific purpose for filtering runoff and interacting with the adjacent aquatic system.

[5] The US National Agroforestry Center has developed a filter strip design tool called AgBufferBuilder, which is a GIS-based computer program for designing vegetative filter strips around agricultural fields that utilizes terrain analysis to account for spatially non-uniform runoff.

A study by the University of Minnesota found that there was a correlation between the harvesting of timber in riparian buffers and a decline in bird populations.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a farming assistance program in the United States, provides many incentives to landowners to encourage them to install riparian buffers around water systems that have a high chance of non-point water pollution and are highly erodible.

A study done by the University of Georgia, conducted over a nine-year period, monitored the amounts of fertilizers that reached the watershed from the source of the application.