CARD: Center for Agricultural and Rural Development

Phil Gassman is an environmental scientist in the Resource and Environmental Policy (REP) Division at CARD, which he joined in 1987. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in agricultural engineering from Iowa State University in 1984 and 1986, and recently received his PhD in environmental science in May 2008 from Iowa State. His research efforts support the integration of environmental and economic models that are used to assess policy scenario impacts for watersheds and other regions, and the testing of field- and watershed-scale models.

Gassman has worked on such varied projects as analysis of the risks and benefits of herbicide use, soil erosion and soil nitrogen loss studies, atrazine leaching in the Midwest, the impacts of alternative practices of livestock operations, and the nature of hog confinement odor. Currently, he is collaborating with The Nature Conservancy, Prairie Rivers Resource Conservation & Development, and other researchers in a water quality analysis of the Boone River Watershed, which is located in North Central Iowa. He is also working with several resource and environmental policy researchers and others at ISU on a watershed study of the entire Upper Mississippi River Basin and in another study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Effects Assessment Project. These studies will assess both the environmental and the economic impacts of different management practices on the watersheds.