Tackling Agricultural Runoff with Tangible Landscape
The watersheds of the coastal plain of North Carolina support a diverse composite of residential communities, small business and agricultural crop and livestock operations. Each watershed has unique potential environmental consequences, and the lower Cape Fear and Neuse River basins have struggled to maintain water quality suitable for healthy aquatic ecosystems and recreational use.
As part of an ongoing study on the sources of fecal waste in the NC coastal plain, I’ve had the opportunity to work with town and county officials in Sampson County, NC to show them a prototype platform for exploring different agricultural runoff mitigation strategies. The platform uses Tangible Landscape, a Tangible User Interface for GRASS GIS, that has been used in several other participatory modeling, education and stakeholder engagement projects at the Center for Geospatial Analytics. The tabletop system allows users to stand around the table and collaboratively modify a landscape model of a farm, adding riparian buffers, vegetated swales, berms and dry retention ponds. Then, with the press of a button, the runoff dynamics from a heavy rainstorm are computed and the results projected back onto the terrain, giving users real-time feedback on their strategies.
One of the most valuable parts of the experience for me was hearing users’ feedback on the activity and discussing how this could be made more useful or ways that they could see themselves using it in their county. In particular, I now have some new ideas for implementing additional nature-based solutions on the model and adding a budget feature. I also learned there was interest in creating a modified version of the activity to look at stormwater drainage in parcels of land under development. Through the project, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to maintain these connections and bring some of these ideas to fruition in the future.
