Critical Water Problem

One of the primary, nonstructural, strategies in watershed management is the acquisition of land or conservation easements to prevent or reduce the flow of pollutants into a stream, lake, or reservoir. As part of its filtration avoidance agreement, the City of New York has agreed to "solicit " the fee title or conservation easement to 355,050 acres in the Catskill/Delaware watershed, and has committed $250 million to this effort (National Research Council, 1999, p. 213). This is a large sum of money and, unless there is a clear understanding of the role particular parcels play in the loading of pollutants and the cost of fee simple or conservation easements, there is great potential for ineffective acquisition and a waste of the City's money. The proposed research will (1) develop a binary optimization model for the cost-effective acquisition of riparian buffers and (2) apply the model to a set of candidate parcels in the Catskill/Delaware watershed. Expected Benefits The problem of optimizing the acquisition of riparian buffers, subject to a budget constraint, will be programmed on an Excel spreadsheet. It will be solved using Excel's Solver. This format will facilitate the transfer, refinement, and application of the model by the City of New York. The program has potential application to other watersheds in New York State. Objectives (1) Develop a model which systematically considers (a) the pollution loading with and without buffer zones for a finite set of riparian parcels, (b) a weighting factor for the potential damage of different pollutants, (c) the cost of acquiring fee simple title or conservation easements for each parcel, and (d) the acquisition budget. (2) Illustrate the usefulness of the model through an application within the Catskill/Delaware watershed