Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area - Environmentally Sensitive Croplands
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About the map
This map shows the 1,047 counties in the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area, or MRCCA, located in 13 states: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin. The gray outlines show each county in the MRCCA, and the darker gray outline displays the 13 states.
Click the button next to each layer to turn it on or off.
The blue layer shows all the counties in the MRCCA with cropland acres in a potential wetland soil landscape, or PWSL, and the total number of PWSL crop acres in that county.
The yellow layer shows county-level payments from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, from 2017 to 2020 to counties in the MRCCA with crops on PWSL acres.
The turquoise layer provides county-level EQIP payments for conservation practices that have climate-mitigation and nutrient-pollution-reduction benefits, for all counties in the MRCCA with PWSL cropland.
Clicking on a county with PWSL cropland acres will bring up a box with attributes about that county. Each pop-up box includes county-level data about:
Not all counties have three practices that received EQIP payments during this time, and total EQIP payments and payments to climate- and nutrient-smart practices may be underestimated. EWG received only county-level EQIP payment data for practices that had more than five contracts in a county in a year. Because of “privacy concerns,” we were not given total county-level EQIP funding for every practice in the data we got in summer 2022 through Freedom of Information Act requests filed with the Department of Agriculture. So the number of practices per county and amount of funding per county may be lower than actual practice counts and payments. The data set can be found in in EWG’s Conservation Database.
See the corresponding report for more information.