It’s true. Healthy forests, the watersheds and headwaters they support, and the clean water they supply are often taken for granted when Americans turn on their taps. In fact, many people are entirely unaware of the link between national forests and clean drinking water. Reflecting on this, we took Secretary Vilsack’s statement to heart — and challenged ourselves to create new ways to make these connections clear in our work. We couldn’t do so, however, without also addressing the most pervasive threat to water quality on our national forests: roads.

We thought about this message, the science behind it, and how to best make the connections. We also remembered that nothing tells a story like a picture. And so Wildlands CPR developed, in partnership with the Ashland, Oregon-based Geos Institute, a set of maps and an associated presentation illustrating and explaining the connections between national forests, roads and clean water. With a focus on Oregon’s municipal water supply, our presentation hits close to home and has already been effective. In addition to laying out the basic tenets of watershed health as it relates to forests and roads, the maps and presentation promote water quality restoration through the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Program.

(To see the complete article, including excellent maps, you must click on "Cover Story.pdf" to the right.  The maps are integral to this story.)

The problems with roads

The Forest Service is responsible for more than 375,000 miles of system roads – making the agency, likely, the largest road  management entity in the world. And those roads wreak havoc on water quality and wildlife habitat. Below is a quick summary of the impacts of roads on water quality, fisheries and drinking water:

• Chronic sediment runoff from roads and trails ends up in streams and rivers, thus reducing water quality for people and aquatic species (e.g. smothering fish eggs and inhibiting nest building).

• Roads constructed on highly erodible soils are prone to severe landslides. Sediments released from landslides have interrupted and damaged the drinking water supplies of numerous communities.

• Poorly constructed forest road systems can move water from one subwatershed to another, changing water availability. Road interactions with stream systems can also change peak flows and runoff regimes.

• Chronic sediment can degrade municipal water supplies, potentially requiring municipalities to install or upgrade filtration systems.
• Blocked, undersized or improperly installed culverts can prevent fish from reaching spawning habitat.
• Compacted road beds alter hydrology by impeding water infiltration and blocking subsurface water flow.

In addition to the hydrologic and aquatic impacts of roads, roads also severely fragment wildlife habitat, lead to the spread of non-native invasive species, cause direct wildlife mortality through roadkill, and increase access for poaching and illegal off-road vehicle use.

Reducing the impacts of roads is the first and most important step the Forest Service can take, in many ecosystems, to improve aquatic and hydrologic conditions. This is even more important in the context of climate change, as severe weather events, including intense storms and spring flooding, are becoming more common and only exacerbating the negative impacts of roads.

National forests and drinking water

Okay, so we know roads are bad, but how much impact does that really have on drinking water for Americans? In the west alone, approximately 50% of Americans depend on national forests for their drinking water. Nationally, federal forests provide about 20% of our drinking water. And clean drinking water isn’t the only municipal benefit from protecting water quality. Municipalities also use this same clean water for agriculture, industry, recreation and more. As a matter of fact, the Forest Service estimates that the clean water generated by national forests is worth approximately $7.2 billion/year.

Major cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and Atlanta depend on national forests for some or all of their drinking water supplies. But how can we make the link between forests and faucets – especially if those forests are often dozens of miles away, or more?

In partnership with Geos, we developed a set of “proof of concept” maps to illustrate the specific connection between municipal water supply, national forests and roads. The maps are intended to create a direct visual link between a municipality and its water supply.

Based on a variety of factors, we decided to focus our effort specifically on Oregon, ultimately developing maps for seven different cities within the state. Oregon is particularly emblematic of the intersection between national forests, roads and clean water. First, Oregon has more national forest roads than any other state in the country – nearly 70,000 miles! Second, according to a draft “Forests to Faucets” report from the Forest Service, Oregon has the highest number of people dependent on national forests for their drinking water. (The Forests to Faucets analysis was national in scope and included non-federal forests – if the assessment were re-calculated only for the west and only for federal forests, it’s possible the results would change.) Third, Oregon is important in the context of climate change. Severe pacific storms are becoming more frequent and more damaging, resulting in more under-maintained logging road failures, spewing sediment into fish-bearing streams and municipal water supplies. We even learned, after developing the maps and showing them to Congressional staff in Washington DC, that the city of Portland had paid for road reclamation and other road mitigation in their municipal watershed, on national forest lands, precisely because of the link between national forests, roads and clean water.

The accompanying series of maps (see following page), focusing on Eugene, OR, begins with a base layer that clearly delineates the geographic boundaries of Eugene’s “surface water source area.” This is the subwatershed from which Eugene secures its municipal water supply. From there, we layered on the land ownership and the “303d” listed streams. These streams have been identified as impaired under the Clean Water Act. Finally, we added the national forest roads layer atop these other layers. Thus the final map shows the significant intersection between roads and streams within the Eugene watershed. With the watershed stretching more than 50 miles away from the city, the maps also provide a visual guide to why people should care about lands that they might not consider to be “their backyard.”

 

Reclaiming roads to restore water quality

Since 2008, the Forest Service has received $225 million for the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Program (LRT) to reduce the hydrologic and aquatic impacts of their road system. These funds have been used to reclaim nearly 3,000 miles of unneeded roads, to restore fish passage by fixing nearly 600 culverts, and upgrading or performing critical maintenance on more than 8,000 miles of roads. The attached chart shows how LRT money was spent specifically in the state of Oregon between 2008-2010 (the FY11 funds were just released as we were finishing this article). As you can see from the chart below, the agency has made increasing progress towards removing unneeded roads in Oregon over the past three years, with their overall road mileage now dropping below 69,000 miles. While we have not had time to perform a qualitative analysis regarding how much of this road work occurred in priority watersheds, it does appear they are spending their funds in a way that is clearly consistent with the intent of LRT.

To ensure that that is the case, however, Wildlands CPR will continue to work with the agency in Oregon and beyond as they identify an ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system (see cover story, RIPorter 16.1). This process will help provide a blueprint for future LRT spending, and it will also intersect with the agency’s ongoing efforts to improve watershed health through their “Watershed Condition Framework,” (see Policy Primer this issue, p8).

LRT, combined with the WCF, will help the agency remove unneeded roads whilealso fixing the roads we do need. And fixing the road system can provide many benefits. Following are some examples.

Ecological benefits

• Improved water quality

• Reduced sedimentation

• Less fluctuation in water temperature

• Reduced pollution

• Improved fish habitat

• Improved riparian habitat and flow patterns

• Cold, clear water

• Restored fish connectivity

• Improved wildlife habitat

• Restored wildlife connectivity

• Improved habitat and food availability

• Improved population resilience and genetic diversity

Social Benefits

• Reliable and consistent road access to both developed and non-developed recreational activities.

• The Forest Service reduced passenger vehicle access on national forest roads by 20% between 2002-2009 because of a lack of maintenance funding. This trend will continue if the agency does not identify and implement a minimum road system

• Improved recreational opportunities

• Improved hunting/fishing opportunities

Economic Benefits

• Reduced water filtration costs for municipal water suppliers.

• Reduced long-term FS maintenance liability/costs.

• Over time, investments in road reclamation are cheaper than continued maintenance expenses.

• Increased number of high-wage, high-skill green jobs.

• For each million spent on road reclamation, between 13-17 direct and indirect jobs are created.

• Road reclamation and storm-proofing jobs typically go to local workers.

 

Conclusion

As Secretary Vilsack said, turning on the faucet and having clean water come out is something that Americans take for granted every day. The link between national forests, roads and clean water is inextricable. Over the past two years, the Forest Service has paid more and more attention to the connection between these issues. Nonetheless, few people understand or are aware of how important forests, including national forests, are as a source for clean drinking water. The more we can increase awareness about the link between national forests and water quality, including the specific and profound impacts roads have on drinking water, the more we can work to improve the situation. Mapping municipal watershed boundaries and the associated threats to water supplies is a critical first step in the process. And flowing from this recognition of the direct link between healthy forest watersheds and pure, clean, tap water, we believe, will be an upwelling of support for reclaiming roads as a primary tool for protecting and restoring this vital repository of clean water.