EPA: Watershed Academy

1. Forestry Connections to Watersheds and Water Quality • Nonpoint Source Pollution or NPS • Is diffuse water pollution that comes from broad areas of rural and urban land. • As water runoff moves over the landscape, it picks up and it may carry away • substances that pollute lakes, rivers, wetlands, coastal waters, and even our • underground sources of drinking water. • Is responsible for 60% of all water quality impairments. Why Water Quality? High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth. - U.S. Senator Edmund S. Muskie What is a Watershed? … • Primary Silviculture NPS Problems: • Sediment • Nutrients • Forest Chemicals • Organic Debris • Temperatures • Stream Flow Forestry activities are dispersed over large areas. They affect and are affected by many natural processes of water, soil and air. Forestry best management practices or BMPs are ways to protect the environment while maintaining the economic sustainability of forestry activities. …is the area of land that drains to a common point such as a river, lake or the ocean. EPA: Watershed Academy Streamside Management Zones Forestry BMPs that Protect Water Quality EPA: Watershed Academy If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you would have done, in one fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health by improving environmental quality. - William C. Clark, ecologist and environmental policy analyst This poster was produced by the Alabama Water Watch Program as part of the Rock Creek Watershed Management Project (RCWP). The Project goal is to develop and implement a stakeholder-driven plan protect the ecology and enhance the economy of the watershed. The RCWP is funded, in part, by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 4, and coordinated through the Auburn University Water Resources Center. For more information about the Project and volunteer water monitoring, visit www.alabamawaterwatch.org. See http://www.forestry.state.al.us/Publications/BMPs/2007_BMP_Manual.pdf for more information about forestry BMPs.