Suwannee River Revisited -- Watershed Assessment Project

Nitrogen continues to be of concern in the Suwannee River Water Management District. In order to address these concerns, a partnership with the agricultural community was developed with the Florida Department of Agriculture (FDACS), the SRWMD, the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), the Soil and Water Conservation Districts and other partners within the watershed. This partnership has concluded that the creation and implementation of BMPs is the best approach to control nitrogen levels in the District‘s ground and surface water.

Both the partnership, in general, and FDEP, in particular, had a strong interest in determining the potential impacts of BMPs. In order to address this issue, FDACS contracted with SWET to use WAM to evaluate the impacts of key agricultural BMPs to be implemented in the basin by 2008. The Lower Suwannee River Basin was chosen for these analyses because it contains a high density of agricultural land uses.