Agricultural Integrated Management System (AIMS)

Funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), AIMS is a web-based system that disseminates seamless geospatial data for modeling purposes and sustainable watershed management, and provides automated simulations of runoff, sediment, and agro-pollutant loadings for any watershed in the U.S.

Research includes the development of the AIMS web portal with a user access management system and a geospatial map server with a graphical user interface based on open-source software. This freely accessible web portal will allow dissemination of seamless geospatial data layers for agricultural modeling applications for a user-selected area. To begin with, some of the existing watershed modeling tools such as TopAGNPS, which is a special version of TOPAZ for landscape analysis and AnnAGNPS, used for agricultural watershed modeling, will be implemented in AIMS by adapting them to be run directly from the portal as web-based application tools, either in automated mode or expert mode with a higher level of interactivity. The computational speed of these models will also be improved by taking advantage of the multi-threaded hardware architecture of modern computers that offer parallelism. Couplings will also be provided to run other applications, such as RUSLE 2, CONCEPTS and CCHE1D. Integrated watershed management tools BMPTOOL (Best Management Practices Tool) and IWMTool (Integrated Watershed Management Tool), which were originally developed as desktop applications, will be adapted to run under the AIMS platform to provide free, web-based integrated watershed management capabilities for the study of any watershed in the USA.