Watershed Health
Our forests and high altitude stream systems provide ecosystem services for watersheds that help protect, restore, and sustain water quality and quantity. Healthy, forested watersheds absorb rainfall and snowmelt and allow it to runoff slowly, recharging aquifers, providing for late-season streamflows, and filtering sediment and pollutants. Healthy watersheds help us adapt to climate change impacts such as drought, wildfire, variable snowpack, and increased flooding. A number of our efforts are focused on avoiding and/or reducing impacts to our watersheds. HCCA also works to find funding and implement projects that improve and restore watershed health on the ground.
Stewardship Projects to Restore Watershed Health
Restoring watershed health helps preserve critical ecosystems services such as protecting water security as temperatures continue to rise and snowpack decreases. Restoring headwater floodplains and adjacent wetlands is one of the best proactive ways to address both water quality and water supply while improving habitat for aquatic and terrestrial species. It has the additional benefits of improving water quality delivered to municipal systems and reducing sedimentation of reservoirs and headgates. Specific benefits from healthy watersheds include improved water quality, storm flow attenuation, flood reduction, and habitat resiliency.
HCCA works on a range of projects that improve watershed conditions. We implement wet meadows restoration projects that restore degraded gullies and retain sediment. We assist with illegal route closures, preventing additional erosion, lowering of water tables, and avoiding habitat fragmentation. Most recently we’ve begun exploring opportunities to use beaver dam analogues and other beaver restoration tactics to rework stream habitat.
Advocating for Watershed Health Protections in Management Decisions and Projects
Watershed challenges include both man-made and natural impacts. The Gunnison basin is experiencing impacts from drought, erosion, wildfire, flooding, and other natural events that have been exacerbated by climate change. Human impacts can cause erosion, low flows, and elevated stream temperatures (amongst other impacts). Water resource managers can enhance watershed resiliency to buffer against some of these impacts. As advocates we can weigh in on management plans and project proposals that threaten to worsen watershed health conditions.
Human uses impact our watersheds in a number of ways. Human impacts may include:
- Road and trail construction (particularly where undersized culverts, no water bars, steep slopes etc.).
- Recreational impacts like loss of riparian vegetation.
- Grazing may cause hoof shear and erosion of stream banks when concentrated.
- Mining impacts on watershed health may include a loss of vegetation, erosion, and water quality impacts associated with acid mine drainage.
- Timber harvest. Timber harvest can alter the forest composition of a watershed in a manner that alters sediment and hydrologic regimes.
We encourage project proponents to assess impacts to watershed health from activities that:
- Add roads and increase erosion and runoff rates
- Impact stream crossings and dewater streams
- Remove vegetation leading to bank destabilization and loss of woody debris
- Increase peak flows and lead to earlier runoff
- Have other negative impacts on watershed health