Project properties

Title Linear ecological focus areas to limit stream contamination from intensive croplands
Group Soil Physics and Land Management group
Project type thesis
Credits 24-39
Supervisor(s) Joao Pedro Nunes
Examiner(s) Coen Ritsema
Contact info joao.carvalhonunes@wur.nl
Begin date 2021/05/25
End date
Description Description: Problem context
Intensive agricultural areas often contaminate nearby steams with nutrients coming from fertilizer use. However, these areas often have Ecological Focus Areas (EFA) with vegetation, such as field margins, hedges, trees, fallow land, landscape features, biotopes, buffer strips, and afforested areas. EFAs can slow down surface runoff, limiting the exports of nutrients from the fields; and they provide other ecosystem services for biodiversity. In Portugal, farmers are not compensated for maintaining these EFAs, leading to their abandonment or replacement by farmland.

Project OPTIMUS PRIME (https://optimusprime.pt/) is quantifying the ecosystem services provided by EFAs to irrigated croplands and biodiversity, aiming at calculating tradeoffs between environmental and agro-policy objectives, and ultimately to calculate a fair compensation for farmers to maintain EFAs, as they work the land and know it better than most. This research is carried out in the intensively irrigated floodplains of the lower Tagus valley near Lisbon.

Research Objective/Question

The thesis work aims at quantifying the economic and environmental costs and benefits of tradeoffs between EFAs and crop area in the Almondaregion of the lower Tagus valley. The research questions are: (i) what are the costs and benefits of currently existing EFAs in the region?, and (ii) where could EFAs be increased to maximize benefit?

What is expected from the student (type of research)

The work will mostly involve GIS-based analysis
1.Identify and map EFAs, and the potential location of EFAs, using high resolution cartography and GIS.
2.Estimate the ecosystem services and farmer costs of EFAs using calculation tools developed by the project.
3.Usingthesametools and GIS, map where the increase in EFAs might bring maximum benefits at minimum costs.
Used skills
Requirements experience with GIS software; notions of hydrology, ecosystem services and land management