Watershed Restoration Background

Our mission -- to revive and protect wild places by promoting watershed restoration that improves fish and wildlife habitat, provides clean water and enhances community economies -- provides the framework for our focus on watershed restoration.  According to multiple dictionary websites, a watershed is basically a specified area of land drained by one river system. 

The Environmental Protection Agency has a simple, but very useful definition page that includes the following:

A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains off of it goes into the same place. John Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is:

"that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about a watershed is that it is "an area of land."  This means that restoring watersheds requires that we treat problems that are occurring on the land.  In wildland ecosystems, roads are one of the biggest threats to overall watershed health. 

Roads

Roads cause profound impacts to streams and aquatic systems, for example:

  • Sediment runoff from roads and trails ensds up in streams and rivers, smothering fish eggs and inhibiting nest building.
  • Compacted road beds alter hydrology by impeding water infiltration and blocking subsurface water flow.
  • Roads constructed on highly erodible soils are prone to severe landslides.  Sediments released from landslides have damaged fisheries and interrupted and degraded the drinking water supplies of numerous communities.
  • Chronic sediment can degrade municipal water supplies, potentially causing municipalities to install or upgrade filtration systems.
  • Blocked, undersized or improperly installed culverts can prevent fish from reaching spawning habitat.

In addition, roads cause significant impacts to terrestrial species:

  • Direct wildlife mortality as a result of roadkill occurs on nearly all roads, but increases the higher the speed of traffic on any given road.
  • Wildlife habitat is severely fragmented by roads.  Ecologists estimate that wildlife are adversely affected beginning with a road density of one mile of road per square mile of land (1mi/mi2).
  • Roads can reduce the effectiveness of those natural areas that act as wildlife corridors, providing connectivity between core habitats.
  • Roads act as vectors for the spread of nonnative pest, plants and pathogens.
  • Roads act as the primary access for both poaching and illegal off-road vehicle use.

Thus preventing, mitigating or completely stopping the impacts (through restoration) caused by roads is one of the most important steps we can take to restore watershed health, and specifically the aquatic and terrestrial impacts caused by roads.

Road reclamation

Reclaiming roads is a critical step towards successful watershed restoration efforts.  Road reclamation is also called road decommissioning or road removal.  When Wildlands CPR uses any of these terms, we are referring to the physical removal of the road and simultaneous reclamation of the land to its former condition (or as close to its former condition as possible). 

Wildlands CPR works to promote road reclamation in wildland ecosystems to restore watershed health and terrestrial connectivity.  While we have, on occassion, helped coordinate actual road reclamation projects, most of our road reclamation work is focused on advocacy.  We advocate for improved planning to determine which roads are needed or not needed on federal lands.  We also advocate for increased public and private funding for road reclamation on federal and nonfederal wild lands.  To learn more about that advocacy, see the "Rightsizing" section below.

In addition to reconnecting fragmented habitat and restoring aquatic/hydrologic conditions, road reclamation provides high-wage, high-skill jobs in rural communities.  Reclaiming a road requires the very same heavy equipment as constructing a road.  But road reclamation is as much an art as a science.  To be done well and to have all of the intended effects, heavy equipment operators need significant training.

Rightsizing

While road reclamation makes scientific sense, it is still relatively new to land managers.  The concept of reclaiming roads began in Redwood National Park in the 1970s.  Land managers there were dealing with incredible sedimentation problems, and that sedimentation was severely degrading salmon habitat.  So after trying nearly every contemporary method of instream sedimentation control, they realized they had to stop the sediment at the source, and the primary source was roads.  They began reclaiming roads, and it worked.  Soon other agencies and land managers followed in norhtern California and throughout the country. 

Wildlands CPR has been involved in numerous advocacy efforts to promote wildland road reclamation and to help securre funding for this important work.  Road reclamation not only improves water quality and watershed health, but it also provides green jobs in rural, forest-dependent communities.  In 2007, we began partnering with the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative and their campaign to secure funding for the Legacy Roads and Tails Initiative.  As of 2011, that campaign has secured $225 million for road reclamation and related mitigation to reduce the impacts roads are having on fisheries and municipal drinking supplies.  In 2009, we put together a series of reports outlining the political economy of watershed restoration.  These reports followed up on our 2003 report, "Investing in Communities, Investing in the Land," which highlighted the job creation potential from road reclamation.  In 2011, we began advocacy efforts to move beyond federal funding for road reclamation, but that work remains in its infancy.