Abstract: The objective of sustainable agriculture is to maintain high agriculture productivity while preserving a sound environmental quality. However, water quality degradation caused by excessive sediment and nutrient runoff has become a critical environment impact on agricultural watersheds all over the world. Beneficial management practices (BMPs) are therefore designed and implemented to minimize these negative impacts on water environment. In 2004, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) launched a watershed evaluation of BMPs (WEBs) project with a primary goal of assessing the environmental and economic performance of nine selected small watersheds across Canada under BMPs. The WEBs is composed of four main components, including biophysical evaluation, economic evaluation, hydrologic modeling, and integrated modeling. So far, WEBs has made significant progress in understanding the environmental and economic performance of the BMPs selected for the study and in validating hydrologic models using results from the field-tested BMPs, and WEBs has successfully begun to integrate biophysical and economic findings for planning for broader scales of land. The innovative and interdisciplinary research conducted in the WEBs watersheds will help farmers decide what practices might work best on their farm and will help the governments develop policies and programs to assist farmers in implementing effective BMPs for improving water quality and agri-environment. Additionally, the WEBs project has created the infrastructure, data sets and partnerships needed to continue a long-term watershed research, strengthen the initial findings and clarify the benefits of BMPs under different conditions. A general review of the progress,methods, and major findings of the WEBs project over the past years has been presented, and the necessity for China to implement similar projects has been discussed.

Key words: watershed evaluation, beneficial management pratices(BMPs), water quality, non-point source pollution, agricultural environment, Canda