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NRCS Regional Conservation Partnership Program - Mississippi River Basin

    The Mississippi River is North America’s largest river, flowing over 2,300 miles through America’s heartland to the Gulf of Mexico. The watershed not only provides drinking water, food, industry, and recreation for millions of people, it also hosts a globally significant migratory flyway and home for over 325 bird species. This dataset includes a printer-friendly CCA map and shapefiles for GIS.

    USLE Project

      The USLE_1981-4 project data (Universal Soil Loss Equation) was collected from of (9) sites at (4) locations. A Swanson rotating boom simulator with (30) V-Jet 80100 nozzles applied rainfall at two different intensities, 60 or 130 mm/hour depending on how many nozzles were turned on. Specially designed flumes used with the FW-1 automatic water level recorder were used to obtain continuous runoff flow measurements. The sites in this data set followed a standardized rainfall simulator protocol which future studies by multiple investigators would continue to use. The data set contains rainfall simulator hydrologic and erosion data as well as vegetation and ground data collected in spring and fall from 1981 to 1984.

      APEX – Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender Model

        Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender (APEX) has components for routing water, sediment, nutrients, and pesticides across complex landscapes and channel systems to the watershed outlet as well as groundwater and reservoir components. A watershed can be subdivided as much as necessary to assure that each subarea is relatively homogeneous in terms of soil, land use, management, and weather. APEX was constructed to evaluate various land management strategies considering sustainability, erosion (wind, sheet, and channel), economics, water supply and quality, soil quality, plant competition, weather, and pests. The routing of water, sediment, nutrient, and pesticide capabilities are some of the most comprehensive available in current landscape-scale models and can be simulated between subareas and channel systems within the model. APEX can perform long-term continuous simulations for modeling the impacts of different nutrient management practices, tillage operations, conservation practices, alternative cropping systems, and other management practices on surface runoff and losses of sediment, nutrients, and other pollutant indicators.

        iSnobal

          iSnobal is a physically-based distributed snowmelt model. A coupled energy and mass-balance model iSnobal is used to simulate the development and melting of the seasonal snowcover.

          NUOnet (Nutrient Use and Outcome Network) database

            The Nutrient Uptake and Outcomes (NUOnet) database will be able to help establish baselines on nutrient use efficiencies; processes contributing to nutrient losses; and processes contributing to optimal crop yield, nutritional and organoleptic quality. This national database could be used to calculate many different environmental indicators from a comprehensive understanding of nutrient stocks and flows.

            NAL Geodata

              The United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Library Geospatial Data catalog contains geographic location-based agricultural research data, imagery, research location context, and more. Users can search records representing a variety of datasets, maps and graphics, aerial and phenocam images, and other services.

              ARS Water Database

                The ARS Water Data Base is a collection of precipitation and streamflow data from small agricultural watersheds in the United States. This national archive of variable time-series readings for precipitation and runoff contains sufficient detail to reconstruct storm hydrographs and hyetographs. There are currently about 14,000 station years of data stored in the data base. Watersheds used as study areas range from 0.2 hectare (0.5 acres) to 12,400 square kilometers (4,786 square miles). Raingage networks range from one station per watershed to over 200 stations. The period of record for individual watersheds vary from 1 to 50 years. Some watersheds have been in continuous operation since the mid 1930's.

                Data from: Gas emissions from dairy barnyards

                  To assess the magnitude of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes, nutrient runoff and leaching from dairy barnyards and to characterize factors controlling these fluxes, nine barnyards were built at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center Farm in Prairie du Sac, WI (latitude 43.33N, longitude 89.71W). The barnyards were designed to simulate outdoor cattle-holding areas on commercial dairy farms in Wisconsin. Each barnyard was approximately 7m x 7m; areas of barnyards 1-9 were 51.91, 47.29, 50.97, 46.32, 45.64, 46.30, 48.93, 48.78, 46.73 square meters, respectively. Factors investigated included three different surface materials (bark, sand, soil) and timing of cattle corralling. Each barnyard included a gravity drainage system that allowed leachate to be pumped out and analyzed. Each soil-covered barnyard also included a system to intercept runoff at the perimeter and drain to a pumping port, similar to the leachate systems.

                  Measured Annual Nutrient loads from AGricultural Environments (MANAGE) database

                    The MANAGE (Measured Annual Nutrient loads from AGricultural Environments) database was developed to be a readily-accessible, easily-queried database of site characteristic and field-scale nutrient export data. Initial funding for MANAGE was provided by USDA-ARS to support the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) and the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board as part of their mission to understand and mitigate agricultural impacts on water quality. MANAGE contains data from a vast majority of published peer-reviewed N and P export studies on homogeneous cultivated, pasture/range, and forested land uses in the US under natural rainfall-runoff conditions, as well as artificially drained agricultural land. Thus MANAGE facilitates expanded spatial analyses and improved understanding of regional differences, management practice effectiveness, and impacts of land use conversions and management techniques, and it provides valuable data for modeling and decision-making related to agricultural runoff.