Watershed Protection

Water, An Essential Resource


In many areas of the United States, municipalities hold considerable acreage primarily for extraction of ground- and surface waters.  Charged with ensuring a readily available supply of high-quality drinking water, municipal water authorities acquire water rights and strive to protect source watersheds from environmental degradation.  To achieve this end, water authorities seek to implement protective measures, often across a checkerboard of land-uses resulting from varied ownership by private individuals, corporations, state, or federal lands.  One of the most famed and successful initiatives in protecting municipal drinking water is that of the New York City's Water Board.  New York City, through outright purchases, conservation agreements, and other means has protected 35% of its one million-acre source watershed and was recently authorized to continue expanding this figure (New York Times article).

One of the most proven tools used to implement watershed protection are Best Management Practices (BMPs).  Often collaboratively developed at the state level as voluntary regulatory guides for commercial operations in the Forestry, Agriculture, and Energy sectors, BMP programs have proliferated and become the basis for many new mandatory regulations.  For instance, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative, a long-term, multi-agency project to restore the ecological health of the Chesapeake Bay, has asked partner states to enforce mandatory BMP compliance on lands within the Bay's watershed.  In these states, land managers are required to provide notice of timber harvest operations and permit state inspection to validate BMP compliance such as implementation of stream protection measures.

Watershed protection thus provides a range of opportunities for natural resources professionals.  Regulatory processes such as mandatory BMPs require much data collection, reporting, and oversight by trained professionals to implement and ensure compliance.  Once advocated by only a few such as the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), watershed protection has grown to a recognized regional environmental issue, a primary consideration of municipal, state, and federal agencies, and a key duty of many natural resources professionals.