Introduction

The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) is a program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA). The CREP is part of the larger Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a national program that provides annual rental payments to farmers in exchange for establishing permanent conservation cover on environmentally sensitive lands, effectively removing these lands from crop production. The CRP is the United States’ largest conservation program in terms of acres affected and dollars expended. The size and scope of the CRP necessitate broad goals that align with the Nation’s core conservation priorities. The CREP brings a more targeted approach to the CRP by leveraging Federal and non-Federal dollars to address specific conservation concerns and priorities at a more local, often State or regional, scale. Although agreements under the CREP also align with national priorities, the more specific and localized nature of the program results in a multitude of goals and objectives across agreements enacted between the USDA and its numerous CREP partners.

The Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–334; also known as the 2018 Farm Bill) requires the Secretary of Agriculture to submit an annual report to Congress that, among other things, reports on progress made towards fulfilling commitments outlined in the CREP agreements. Staff from the Economic and Policy Analysis office of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation Business Center (FPAC–BC) requested assistance from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in developing a reporting template and online submission mechanism that would assist CREP partners in providing the information needed by the FSA to comply with this congressional mandate. The statutory language in the 2018 Farm Bill states that the annual report to Congress must include information on (1) status of agreements, (2) purposes and objectives of agreements, (3) Federal and eligible partner commitments made under the agreements, and (4) progress made towards fulfilling those commitments.

Reflecting the diverse goals and objectives of individual agreements, annual reports from partnering States have been provided in a wide variety of formats and often did not provide sufficient information needed to meet congressional reporting requirements. Thus, the FSA asked that the USGS also evaluate the information being collected from partners to identify deficiencies that prevent the accurate reporting of progress towards meeting commitments. Additionally, the FSA sought to identify ways to quantify progress in terms of benefits related to water quantity, water quality, and habitat that are not consistently identified in the purposes and objectives of agreements. The hopes were that these quantifications would bridge across most or all agreements and allow for a more national view of program effects in addition to reporting progress made towards meeting the localized goals specific to each agreement. Adding these overarching conservation effect quantifications to annual CREP reports builds upon past ecosystem services modeling efforts completed through the Integrated Landscape Modeling Partnership that the USGS began with the FSA, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Commodity Credit Corporation, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an effort that has been ongoing since 2007 (Mushet and Scherff, 2016).

Development of Online Reporting Form and Guide

The online reporting form is designed to ensure that consistent information is submitted to the FSA from each of its CREP State partners. Providing information to the FSA in a consistent manner will assist CREP partners in meeting reporting requirements and the FSA in providing timely reports to Congress of progress made towards meeting the objectives of each CREP agreement. Additionally, a standardized reporting format will assist the FSA in collecting information needed to support ecosystem service quantifications beyond the specific quantifications required from CREP partners to document progress towards meeting the purposes and objectives listed in individual agreements.

Creating Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program State Partner Reports from Online Submissions

After information is collected from the CREP State partners using the online reporting form, MS-Word is used to generate individual State reports. The first step to producing the completed State reports is to export the data collected in MS-Forms as five separate Microsoft Excel (MS-Excel) files, one for each of the five sections of the reporting form. The five files are then merged into a single MS-Excel spreadsheet, and additional columns are added to accommodate Federal commitment data. These columns are then populated with the Federal commitment data provided directly from the FSA national office. The final MS-Excel spreadsheet should have 136 columns that match the columns and column headings depicted in appendix 3. Once the combined MS-Excel data file is created, the “Mail Merge” feature of MS-Word is used to harvest data from the combined data file for direct input into State reports. A CREP State report mail merge template (appendix 4) was created and provided to the FPAC–BC for this purpose. By selecting the combined MS-Excel file as the input file and selecting “Edit Individual Documents” under the “Edit & Merge” button in MS-Word, the State reports are generated as a series of documents to which photographs provided by States can be added. This also is the time to review the reports to be sure that the “Mail Merge” process imported data from the MS-Excel file correctly. Each State report can then be saved as a separate MS-Word or Portable Document Format file. Copies of individual State reports are then generally provided to the CREP partners for their individual records.

Summary Report to Congress

Once the combined MS-Excel file has been created and Federal commitment data have been added, creating a summary report for Congress is a straightforward matter of updating acreage, commitment, and progress information provided in the previous year’s report. Summaries of acreages, financial commitments (Federal and non-Federal), and other commitments are obtained by adding sum formulas to the appropriate columns in the combined MS-Excel spreadsheet. Partner progress text is added to the appropriate objectives statement in the report using the cut and paste tool in MS-Word. Drafts of 2020 and 2021 reports generated for Congress are provided in appendixes 5 and 6, respectively. Because the fields of the draft report contain text provided by the State partners, the draft report often contains errors (for example, in-text references to figures in a State report that are not included in the report to Congress). Such errors can be corrected by a careful review. The draft reports then undergo an FSA internal approval process before submission to Congress to meet Farm Bill requirements.

Evaluation of 2020 and 2021 Partner Reports

One of the key takeaways from an evaluation of the reporting information provided by CREP State partners in 2020 and 2021 is the diversity of purposes and objectives among agreements; however, given the specific and localized nature of the CREP, this is not surprising. Most of the agreement purposes were fairly generalized, and some contained water quality, water quantity, and habitat components. For example, the stated purpose of the Colorado Republican River CREP agreement is to “reduce the amount of irrigation water consumptive use, conserve energy, and reduce agricultural chemicals and sediment from entering waters of the State from agricultural lands” and to “enhance aquatic and terrestrial wildlife habitat through establishment of permanent vegetative cover.” By contrast, other agreements have more specific stated purposes and may only contain a single water quality, water quantity, or habitat purpose. For example, the stated purpose of the Washington CREP agreement is to “assist in the recovery of salmon species that have been listed as threatened or endangered species under the Federal Endangered Species Act [Public Law 93–205, 87 Stat. 884].”

Similarly, the objectives stated in CREP agreements varied greatly and ranged in number from a single objective (Louisiana Lower Ouachita River CREP agreement, New Jersey CREP agreement) to 12 objectives (Kansas Upper Arkansas River CREP agreement). Although some objectives were specific and quantifiable (for example, “reduce soil erosion from 751,633 tons per year to 259,395 tons per year, a total reduction of 492,238 tons per year” [Colorado Republican River CREP agreement]), others were too general to allow for a quantification of progress towards meeting the objective (for example, “conserve and improve wildlife habitat” [Idaho Eastern Snake River Plain CREP agreement]) or did not set a specific measurable criterion of success (for example, “increase the acres of wetlands in the watersheds for erosion control, sediment reduction, stormwater retention, and nutrient uptake” [Indiana CREP agreement]). In future agreements, care should be taken to ensure that objectives are specific and include a measurable criterion of success if subsequent quantitative information on a CREP partner’s progress towards meeting that objective is required. Also, when forming objectives, thought should be placed into methods that will be used to measure progress. In many CREP agreements that list specific objectives with quantified targets, quantification of progress towards meeting those objectives was not possible by the CREP partner because methods were not in place to measure progress or methods used did not allow for the separation of effects because of CREP conservation actions from other anthropogenic or environmental effects affecting the variable being measured.

From the progress information reported by CREP partners in 2020 and 2021, it was apparent that the partners that were most successful in reporting progress towards meeting specific objectives had objectives in which targets were expressed in terms of acreage of specific conservation cover types to be established that would meet conservation goals under the CREP agreement. Thus, if a partner had a goal to reduce sediment loss by X tons and was able to relate an acre or linear mile of a certain conservation cover type or types to sediment losses, then an objective to establish a certain number of acres or linear miles of a specific conservation cover type would provide for an easily quantifiable measure of progress. Additionally, that measure could be related back to the original environmental goal in terms of a reduction in tons of sediment lost. A wide variety of water quality, water quantity, and habitat variables can be related to land cover types in this way, as described in the “Bringing an Ecosystem Services Approach to Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program Reports” section.

Although CREP agreements current in 2020 and 2021 typically have a single overarching purpose and more specific objectives, breaking the purpose down into environmental goals and then listing objectives that would be needed to reach those goals would facilitate linking environmental effects to more readily obtained information on the establishment of conservation practices. Using this format, a goal would be the specific environmental benefit desired, such as reducing nitrate runoff from fields by 100 tons annually in a target drainage basin. The objective would then be the specific conservation action needed to meet the identified goal (for example, establish 1,000 linear miles of conservation practice X along field edges in a target drainage basin). By listing goals describing desired environmental outcomes and objectives that directly relate to on-the-ground and measurable actions taken by partners, the ability to report on progress towards meeting the purpose and goals of an agreement would be greatly improved.

Bringing an Ecosystem Services Approach to Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program Reports

One of the reasons the FPAC–BC teamed with the USGS was due to the long history of the USDA and USGS working together to develop ecosystem services modeling and quantification techniques through their Integrated Landscape Modeling partnership (Mushet and Scherff, 2016). Bringing an ecosystem services approach to CREP reporting was seen as a way to obtain nationally consistent information that would allow FSA’s annual reports to Congress to be expanded to include quantifications of benefits not specifically identified in CREP agreements. A substantial product from this part of the effort was published as a peer-reviewed journal article in the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management (Mushet and others, 2022). Mushet and others (2022) provided a framework for including ecosystem services into conservation assessments. In addition, they described a case study in which multiple ecosystem services were assessed to quantify the effect of conservation lands within a specific area (Stutsman County, North Dakota). In Mushet and others (2022), online supplemental materials that include information needed to complete model runs are provided. Although specific to the Prairie Pothole Region of the United States, the information provided in the supplemental materials of Mushet and others (2022) serves as a guide to develop similar information facilitating ecosystem assessments in other regions of the United States. As a supplement to information presented in Mushet and others (2022), the following description is provided to assist CREP, FPAC–BC, FSA, and others in adding ecosystem services to quantifications of the multiple benefits provided by conservation programs.

Quantifying Ecosystem Services into the Future

In order for the FSA to better prepare national summaries for their reports to Congress, a broader view of ecosystem services is needed than that provided at the localized scale through individual CREP agreements. It is the nature of the CREP that agreements focus on specific conservation concerns at a more local scale than was possible through the CRP. CREP brought the ability to target localized needs and concerns of local and regional partners to the CRP, but the localized, specific nature of the resultant CREP agreements does not translate well to national reporting requirements. A national-scale quantification of ecosystem services is therefore needed. One potential opportunity to develop such a national assessment of ecosystem services is available in the form of the USGS’s National Biogeographic Map (NBM). The NBM already contains detailed mapping data of land use, species habitat, and species ranges (see https://www.usgs.gov/news/technical-announcement/new-species-habitat-distribution-maps-now-support-conservation-planning). Much like the InVEST modeling system, analytical tools that draw upon current and future datasets could be developed within the NBM to quantify ecosystem services across the Nation. CREP partners could then complete evaluations of conservation effects by zooming into specific areas or regions of interest and completing baseline and no-effect assessments of conservation actions by adding or removing conservation land types (for example, tree plantings, grass buffers) as appropriate. The differences in ecosystem services provided between the baseline and no-practice scenarios would provide a quantification of conservation effects. A wide variety of ecosystem services could be quantified in this way, including carbon storage soil retention, food production, and, given that species range and habitat maps are already a part of the NBM, wildlife habitat. By developing a single tool with the ability to quantify ecosystem services nationwide, CREP partners would be able to consistently quantify services to meet reporting requirements, and the FSA could draw upon these estimates to meet their reporting requirements to Congress as outlined in the 2018 Farm Bill.

Development of such a national-scale mechanism to quantify ecosystem services has been a long-term goal of the Integrated Landscape Modeling partnership since its development (Euliss and others, 2010). Only since about 2020, with large-scale mapping abilities made possible through the development of cloud-based data storage and cloud-based computing, has a realistic mechanism to meet this vision been realized.

Summary

The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is a program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. The Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–334; also known as the 2018 Farm Bill) requires that the Secretary of Agriculture submit an annual report to Congress on Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program agreements that, among other things, reports on the progress made towards fulfilling commitments outlined in the agreements. The U.S. Geological Survey developed an online reporting form designed to ensure that consistent information is submitted to the Farm Service Agency from Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program State partners. Combined with the automated importation of text from partner-provided forms to word-processing documents, individual State reports and annual reports to Congress can now be produced efficiently and in a standardized format. Additionally, use of a standardized reporting format will assist the Farm Service Agency in collecting information needed to support ecosystem service quantifications that go beyond the quantifications required from partners to document progress towards meeting the specific purposes and objectives identified in each agreement. The models within the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs suite of open-source software models offer a spatially explicit means to quantify additional ecosystem services across diverse partners in a consistent manner. Data sources are currently available to provide much of the information needed to run these models and complete simulations that would facilitate the quantification and reporting of the societal values of conservation actions taken under the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. The U.S. Geological Survey has the capabilities needed in the form of cloud storage and cloud computing abilities to surpass obstacles that previously limited widescale quantification of ecosystem services across the varied landscapes and the multitude of conservation practices affected and implemented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is the aim of this report to provide the information needed to move towards widescale monitoring of the Nation’s ecosystem services in a natural accounting framework, similar to the framework used to value financial and human capital.