New Resources: Winter Solstice 2011

Forest Service Releases “Forests to Faucets” Report
After years of research, and many public statements about the importance of forests for providing drinking water, the Forest Service has finally released their Forests to Faucets report and maps. Here’s a quick summary from their announcement:

“The USDA Forest Service Forests to Faucets project uses GIS to model and map the continental United States land areas most important to surface drinking water, the role forests play in protecting these areas, and the extent to which these forests are threatened by development, insects and disease, and wildland fire.”

If you click on the announcement link above, you will go to a website that includes links to all of the maps, the methodology report, and a link to access the base data. We’ve been waiting for the agency to release this report, and look forward to closely reviewing it. We are disappointed, however, that the report does not include roads as one of the primary threats to water quality. That said, the agency clearly understands that there are many threats to surface water quality, including roads, grazing, mining, climate change, and more.

Final FY11 Legacy Roads and Trails Accomplishments
The data is in, and the Legacy Roads and Trails program continues to provide critical funding for watershed restoration related to road impacts. According to the Forest Service Road Accomplishment Reports (RARs), the $45 million in LRT funding in Fiscal Year 2011 (FY11) accomplishments on the ground included:

• Roads decommissioned: 581 miles
• Roads maintained: 1172 miles
• Roads improved: 498 miles
• Bridges constructed, reconstructed (including culvert to bridge upgrades): 57
• Aquatic organism passage restored (culverts fixed or replaced): 143

LRT funding was also used for trails, planning and some overhead, but the RARs don’t include that data (we will update the bulleted list above once we have the trails data). RARs are the annual tracking report the agency uses to document all road activities on the national forests (maintenance, construction, reconstruction, decommissioning, etc). We are still awaiting final LRT project data, including dollars spent per project, which should enable us to update our 2010 report that identified trends in how LRT funding is being spent over time. We also continue to work with the Forest Service to try to get them to conduct analyses on the fiscal/economic benefits and ecological outcomes resulting from the Legacy Roads and Trails program.

We have uploaded both the FY10 and FY11 RAR data on our overall RAR page here. This page also provides an overview of how to use RAR data (e.g. to determine the percentage of roads maintained on your national forest in a given year). Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions about how to read the spreadsheets, what some of the abbreviations mean, or how to conduct specific analyses for your forest.