About ACRE.

The Agricultural Conservation Reduction Estimator (ACRE) is a Web-based tool developed at Grassland Soil and Water Research Laboratory in Temple, Texas. The tool aims to assist conservation planners and producers in assessing the effects of conservation practices that reduce sediment and nutrient pollution from agricultural lands.

ACRE is driven by an extensive national database of export coefficients using Texas Best management practice Evaluation Tool (TBET) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models. In addition, conservation practice efficiencies derived from a mixture of literature values and model simulations were combined with these export coefficients to produce the final data.

The previously calibrated and validated TBET/SWAT was applied nationally using data from the National Agricultural Model (NAM), an effort by the USDA Agricultural Research Service to construct publicly available data sets for modeling at the national scale.

ACRE uses distributional information from both model predictions and literature estimates to perform a Monte-Carlo based estimate of sediment and nutrient loads (with confidence limits) from cultivated cropland. ACRE meets an important need by providing sciense-based estimates of conservation practice benefits at the field scale to producers and conservation planners through a very simple tool.