What water-quality constituent sources are considered in SPARROW models?
|Back to Top| Many environmental factors have been identified as sources in SPARROW models. Among those are point sources as defined by data sets describing actual locations of dischargers such as sewage treatment plant or data sets describing population or urban area as surrogates for point sources. Agricultural sources have also been identified in a variety of forms including: 1) agricultural land as defined using land use / land cover data; 2) estimates of fertilizer application; 3) estimates of manure generation; and 4) estimates of nutrients applied to specific crops. Other sources identified using SPARROW models include atmospheric deposition, urban land and natural sources, such as from mining areas. In all cases, these data sets are continually improved and those improvements are incorporated in SPARROW models as they occur. Any of these constituent sources or others can be potentially included in a SPARROW model, provided the geospatial data are available to describe it and sp
