We wanted to provide a way of looking at what those decisions would mean for the landowners and their income as well as what it would mean for the watershed. The Cache River watershed is a huge basin that funnels water from creeks and streams in five of Illinois' southernmost counties through the Cache and out to the Mississippi. Its woods, bluffs, prairies and swamps shelter 100 of the state's endangered or threatened plant and animal species. In near-constant use for roughly two centuries, the Cache River watershed was first farmed, then logged, then drained, cleared and logged again. And that, in part, is what makes it such a good site for the SIU researchers' forecasting tools.
Farmers live there, own the land and make similar decisions, which have relatively the same effects.
Basically, this is a procedure that would be adjustable if used elsewhere. All you need to start is a digitized image of soils. That's just where Beaulieu and Kraft started. Using Geographic Information System, or GIS, software, they broke the watershed down into individual farms, then classified each according to what soil types it had. Soil characteristics determine how productive different crops will be and thus how much money a farmer will make.