Abstract:
The Upper Neuse River Basin spans six counties in the Piedmont region of North
Carolina and is the drinking water source for over half a million people. This water
resource needs to be protected so that it can meet the growing demand spurred by rapid
population growth. Land conservation is one method for drinking water protection. The
Upper Neuse Clean Water Initiative (UNCWI) has successfully prioritized parcels for
conservation and suggested potential funding sources. However, they did not consider
nonpoint source pollutant loads based on parcel landcover and the distance from the
parcel to the surface water intakes or costs of acquiring parcels. The objective of this
project is to further prioritize the UNCWI high-priorty parcels using a parcel-pollutantweighting
model that considers budget constraints. There are four different scenarios of
the model run based on area of the watershed and future land use scenarios. The second
objective is to provide the model and results to local conservation organizations and
county governments. A user-friendly Excel version of the model will be developed so
that land conservationists can input their own variables for parcel prioritization to protect
water quality.
