Sustainable Water Management
Delivery of Phosphorus from Agricultural Sources to Watercourses (PEDAL)
Cost: £450k
Duration: 2003-2006
Project Overview
Project Details
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Details
Phosphorus export from agricultural land to water is the sum of P mobilisation + P delivery, and delivery is usually represented as the ratio of what arrives at a point along a particular transport pathway to the P that was mobilised into that pathway. The assessment of P delivery is a problem that has been neglected in the past, either because the processes of mobilisation and transport have been modelled mechanistically without any real need for evaluating the components separately or because models have been evaluated only in terms of measured outputs from a plot or catchment area.
Work to date
The PEDAL project is one year into a three year programme of research. In the first year a framework for defining delivery has been developed in the form of a decision tree into which currently available data and knowledge on P mobilisation and P export has been collated.
This first stage of the project has helped to identify the gaps in our knowledge and forms the basis of the second stage, which is building a field toolkit to fill these gaps in a number of catchments throughout England and Wales and is developing the fieldwork element for years 2 and 3 of the programme.
Click on image to view an example of a hi-med-lo decision tree.