Location: Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-30400-001-072-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Aug 18, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2026
Objective:
- Conduct human-centered design on decision tool to ensure tools that are both useful and usable.
- Leverage current efforts to build VegSpec
- Create a robust product that is easy to maintain and expand in the future
- Develop the ability to store user interactions and facilitate interactions with NRCS personnel
- Construct web-applications that are both desktop and mobile compliant.
- Build a geo-spatial module to the decision tool to enable recommendations based on site-specific conditions and landowner objectives.
Approach:
Conservation vegetation management is critical for conserving our soil, water, and other natural resources. There is a critical need by NRCS conservation planners and public and private sector agricultural professionals that provide technical assistance to growers on vegetative-based conservation management practices to be armed with web-based decision systems and training on the tools to best serve US land managers. Planners need information for selecting appropriate plant species for conservation practices based on local site conditions and science-based performance data. This agreement will be used to design, construct, and connect decision tools into a Vegetation Planning Tool/Vegetation Specification Suite (VegSpec). The tool will be instrumental in helping NRCS field technical staff generate implementation requirements among stakeholders.