Land Use Characteristics and Water Quality: A Methodology for Valuing of Forested Buffers

摘要

Changes in land use/land cover, the intensity of agricultural lands management, and other activities within a basin area often result in water quality problems. Most of the time the pollutants are form nonpoint sources (NPS), which by their nature are diffuse. Centralized water treatment sys- tems are often not economically feasible to mitigate such problems, nor are they environmentally desirable.. in these situations, the role of forested stream buffers in NPS pollution assimilation becomes important.