Since 2000, Illinois farmers have worked with TNC researchers and their partners in two sub-watersheds of the Upper Mackinaw River watershed in central Illinois to implement conservation practices on private farmland and to monitor their effectiveness for improving water quality, hydrology, and biodiversity at the watershed scale. For the last decade, more focus has been on construction of small tile-treatment wetlands along the edges of fields to reduce the amount of nutrients that enter the river system from agricultural drainage tiles. In the last two years, TNC has added cover crops to test the effectiveness of bundled practices at the watershed scale. Almost 700 acres of cover crops were planted in the treatment watershed in 2020.
