What is the watershed approach?

We face many complex and challenging environmental problems related to the water environment. Unlike the problems of the past, today's problems are often subtle, chronic, and inter-related. Addressing 21st century problems like polluted runoff, suburban growth, drinking water security, ground water/surface water interactions, invasive species, microbes in drinking water, and atmospheric deposition demands a modern approach to environmental protection - an approach grounded in sound science, innovative solutions, and broad public involvement.

Much of the current effort at the federal and state levels to clean up pollution and protect water quality is organized through a watershed approach focused on geographic boundaries defined by drainage basins instead of political or jurisdictional boundaries. This approach provides a flexible coordinating framework that focuses public and private efforts on targeted problems within specific drainage basins.

The guiding principles of this approach are stakeholder partnerships, a geographic focus, and sound science. Thousands of projects over dozens of years have shown that involving the people affected by watershed management decisions in making those decisions generates high levels of long-term support and success.

The elements of developing a successful watershed management plan include the following:
• Build and maintain partnerships
• Set goals
• Assess and characterize the water body
• Identify and assess problems
• Develop and implement the watershed plan

EPA’s support to watershed approach

Recently, EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Water, G. Tracy Mehan, reaffirmed the Office of Water's commitment to advancing the watershed approach and created a Watershed Management Council (WMC) to oversee a series of initiatives and partnerships based on the watershed approach. Among the charges to the WMC were to support: (1) the creation of model program integration by funding projects in select watersheds to integrate EPA and other federal programs; (2) development of local watershed strategies; (3) local capacity building with a wide array of training and technical assistance; (4) assistance to States and Tribes in implementing best watershed approaches; (5) innovation such as new, non-traditional methods to provide data and information in ways that allow stakeholders at the local level to better assess and address their own unique problems (including new monitoring and information collection in watersheds, landscape modeling and probabilistic designs, and integrated approaches to TMDL development in watersheds).

How can we characterize the watershed and identify problems?

Increasingly, State, Federal and Tribal water resource professionals as well as watershed managers and local governments are turning to computerized analytic models to help with both decision-making and as a means for achieving greater results from their programs. Environmental data, science, and integrated utilization of the information are still in their developmental infancy relative to their level of sophistication and usefulness.

Advances in information technology (IT) are being utilized to successfully provide information and data for many users with the watershed framework. Now advanced web and other IT capabilities are opening up new possibilities for assisting local governments and resource managers with tools for environmental/land use/water quality protection and economic assessment options.

The States within EPA Region 5 are all experimenting and supporting some web-based education, data distribution and decision support tools. The decision support systems, (DSS) with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), interactive modeling, and on-line scenario development options are in their early stages of evolution and use. Yet, these more advanced interactive systems hold the most potential for having the greatest impact on decisions.

Sharing best analytic methods and tools

USEPA, State and local agencies, and the Land Grant Universities with research and outreach (extension) missions are key players with responsibility for assisting with knowledge, data, and science for local environmental decision-making. Decisions within major watersheds are made by numerous units of governments and thousands of individuals. Further, these Region partners have begun working together to advance these developments by sharing experiences, needs, failures and successes, and optimize these systems uniformly across the Region.

The first step involved an invitational workshop hosted by EPA Region 5, Michigan State University, and Purdue University held in Chicago in April 2002. The purpose of this workshop was to facilitate the advancement for web-based decision support in the midwest region. This workshop brought together State, Federal and Tribal water resource managers, the Land Grant University Extension community, as well as watershed managers and local governments, who are turning to GIS systems and computer analytic models to help with both decision-making and as a means for achieving greater results from their programs. Each of these groups supported web-based education, data distribution, and decision support tools within their State. This workshop provided an opportunity for these practitioners to share information and experiences about their efforts, allowed the opportunity to advance Region-wide efforts, and worked toward a unifying process across the Region.

Creating the strategy and building the partnership

At that workshop, the participants were eager to continue to share their expertise and tools. They developed a strategic outline for a Midwest Partnership for Watershed Management Decision Support Systems(WMDSS) and three workgroups: (1) Education, Outreach, and Training, (2) Data and Models and (3) Decision Support System Development.

For details of the proposed scope of work for each of the Goals in the strategic outline below can be found as links on this web site.

Overall Goal:
To develop, promote and disseminate web-based watershed management decision support systems (WM-DSS) to help our users manage midwestern watersheds

Purpose:
The purpose of this cooperation is to assist Region 5 communities to manage watersheds.

Benefits of a multi-state WM-DSS:
• Provide watershed groups with the necessary education, training and tools to write, implement, evaluate and adjust their watershed management efforts,
• Accelerate the realization of natural resource and environmental benefits.
• Decrease expertise-related bottlenecks encountered by watershed committees, thus allowing committees more time to make informed decisions.
• Facilitate the identification of cumulative impacts and trends and decrease emergency and homeland security response times.
• Facilitate the comparison of “What if” scenarios and visualizing impacts of proposed strategies or responses to public health, environment, and natural resource emergencies.
• Create the means to conduct performance-based assessments of implemented watershed plans.
• Reduce costs and duplication of information, education, data and tools.
• Reduce inconsistencies across states and facilitate the rapid deployment and use of science-based decision tools.
• Decrease GIS staff training and maintenance and purchases of GIS software.

Goal #1: Provide Education, Outreach, and Training on Decision Support Tools to Communities

While tools currently exist that support sound decision-making at the local, state, and watershed level, many local governments, state agencies, and watershed groups are unaware of their existence. Outreach and training to these groups is critical to raise the awareness of the tools, enhance understanding of their value, and promote their use.

Objective 1(a): Increase audience awareness of and access to Internet-based geospatial decision-support tools.
Objective 1(b): Enhance audience understanding of the purpose of geospatial data in managing watersheds and how content is used in creating decision-support tools:

Goal #2: Development and public access to a web-based watershed management data and decision support system (WMD-DSS)

Objectives and activities are divided into three phases: (1) development and public access to a web-based watershed management data and decision support system (WMD-DSS); (2) decision support tools; and web-based, comprehensive data management system. Objectives and activities under phase one satisfy the immediate needs of watershed groups, resource experts and watershed managers for access to available watershed information, educational materials, data and basic mapping tools for inventorying important economic and natural resources. Objectives and activities in the remaining two phases contribute to the building of a comprehensive WMD-DSS that includes specific tools, data, and education programs for phase two and phase three overlap and interact throughout the project and result in the development of specific tools needed by watershed groups to achieve their stated economic, social, and environmental goals.

Objective 2(a): Assess education and training needs of watershed groups, local and state government officials, Extension, and resource experts and develop a 5-year action plan.
Objective 2(b): Construct a web-based portal for watershed groups and experts to visit and use
Objective 2(c): Develop and make available a web-based, geo-spatial map engine and critical data layers of participating states.

Objective 2(d): Update and maintain the map engine and data

GOAL # 3: Design the Architecture and Build an Integrated Decision Support System (DSS)

Build a multi-state distributed DSS based on current interoperable state-of-the-art technologies: data, model, process, hardware, and network.

Objective 3: Development of software tools and web map engines
Activities: Requirement analysis and standard setting
Design user-oriented system features
Identify data and systems sharing
Implement plan