Nonpoint Source Water Quality Trading outcomes: Landscape-scale patterns and integration with watershed management priorities

Abstract

Nonpoint source (NPS) water quality trading (WQT) has been lauded as a way to reduce water pollution while mitigating costs, but NPS WQT programs often do not account for cumulative landscape-scale impacts to hydrological and ecological processes. In this work, we parameterize the landscape-scale patterns of an emerging NPS WQT market in Virginia (n = 606 transactions) and describe potential tradeoffs and synergies. We also examine program outcomes in the context of Virginia's spatially-explicit conservation and restoration priorities, and discuss ways in which NPS WQT integrates or fails to integrate with these state-level watershed management goals. These spatial and policy analyses demonstrate novel ways to evaluate NPS WQT programs. Our results reveal how NPS WQT has influenced Virginia land management patterns in practice. Specifically, we show that this program has encouraged the transfer of water quality Best Management Practices (BMPs) from urban to rural areas. Impact sites are often far from mitigation sites, at an average of 164.6 km apart measured along the stream network and most often migrated outside the 8-digit Hydrologic Unit Code watershed boundaries. We also find opportunity for improved integration with the state-level management priorities, including that an estimated 22% of the NPS WQT mitigation site area works against state priorities (for example by converting prime farmland to forest), 9% supports state priorities, and 69% neither negates nor supports state priorities. We suggest policy and management actions that can increase the integration of NPS WQT with statewide watershed management goals, and could ultimately improve environmental returns from this fast-growing program.

Keywords: Land use prioritization; Landscape-scale; Nonpoint source pollution; Water quality trading; Watershed management.