Forests to Faucets

It’s been over two years since US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack laid out a vision for the Forest Service focused on restoring water quality and watershed health. Since then, the agency has taken on a number of initiatives to implement that vision. A year ago, for example, they instituted a new Watershed Condition Framework (WCF) process to assess the physical condition of all watersheds, identify priority watersheds and then develop and implement watershed restoration plans in those priority areas. They’ve made a lot of progress on the WCF and the first Watershed Restoration Action Plans are just now becoming public.

A month after they announced the WCF, the agency announced their road rightsizing initiative. This initiative, which we’ve covered extensively in previous RIPorters, should result in an ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system by the time it’s completed in 2015. Since roads are one of the greatest threats to water quality, the road rightsizing initiative has the potential to profoundly improve water quality.

We learned last year that USDA had also set up an intra-departmental team to work on water initiatives. Staff from the different agencies within the Department of Agriculture are  meeting to share strategies and create integration for protecting and enhancing water quality in the United States. They’ve also been considering watershed restoration and protection issues as a significant component during their process to rewrite the National Forest Management Act forest planning rules. This change will be an important step forward for the planning regulations.

Sometime within the past two years, the State and Private Forestry branch of the Forest Service undertook a new initiative called, “Forests to Faucets.” The Forests to Faucets (F2F) team worked to identify links between municipal water supplies and forested lands. We were lucky enough to see a draft of their methodology report about a year ago, and it provided some fascinating maps showing how critical forest lands are to water supply. In addition to looking at overall forest cover across the U.S., they also created separate maps that just show the importance of national forests to municipal water supplies – providing some very interesting perspective for people interested in working on ecosystem services projects related to water supply and national forest lands (see cover story, The RIPorter 16.2). Unfortunately, the F2F report highlights only three threats to water quality on federal, state and private forest lands, and roads didn’t make that list.

We had requested the agency to add roads, climate change, grazing and other critical water quality threats to the report, but they had only limited time and capacity for additional analysis. The  final report, released this fall, does at least acknowledge that threats other than those discussed therein are also of significant concern for water provided by forest systems. The report should prove extremely valuable to conservation activists interested in water quality and national forests. The agency is making the data available to the public for people to conduct their own analyses (e.g. to assess road impacts). The agency has also started implementing an F2F project in the Denver watershed — though it is focused on one of their three highlighted threats — fire/fuels.

It’s nice to see the Forest Service taking water quality and watershed health so seriously since Secretary Vilsack gave his vision speech in August 2009. Too often visions are not backed up with concrete action. While the changes to date are mostly related to new reports and proposed processes, if well-implemented and effective over time, they should result in improved water quality on national forests over the long term.