Healthy Forests, Healthy Water

Great to see a good turnout for this event to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Monroe Lake.  As Jill kind of alluded to, at the Forest Service at the Hoosier National Forest, we are not directly responsible for the management of the lake itself.  However, we do manage a substantial portion of the watershed that ultimately feeds the lake and we think we have a pretty important role there.  Really the Monroe Lake watershed is quite a rare gem in the state of Indiana and really in the Midwest as a whole.  As probably many of you know from your history, Indiana, before European settlement, was nearly 80% forested.  Over time, by the turn of the beginning of the 20th century, we’d lost almost all of that.  We were down to less than 5% forest cover in the whole state, and we’ve since rebounded through some great conservation work to be at more than now 20%.  The watershed, or the combined watersheds that feed Lake Monroe, however, are somewhere around 85% forested.  And when it comes to land use, you can’t do any better than having forests when you want clean water to both drink and recreate with. 

So, at Hoosier National Forest we’re really proud that we administer about 15% of the watersheds that feed Monroe Lake.  Our partners at the DNR manage another 20% or so of the watershed and then the rest of that is privately owned lands which are managed for a whole different set of purposes.  The national forest portion of the watershed is public land.  It belongs to all Americans and is managed to provide diverse wildlife habitat and enriching recreational opportunities for all, among many other benefits. 

The U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905 with a core piece of our mission being watershed protection and protection of water quality, as well as quantity.  And that’s a mission that endures to this day more than 100 years later. 

When this dam was completed in 1964, the Hoosier National Forest was only made up of about 123,000 acres – scattered acres across the landscape in southern Indiana.  Since that time, with work with a lot of land trusts, through willing sellers, that size has grown now to more than 204,000 acres in the last 60 years.  So, we’ve grown substantially.  Of that 204,000 acres, about 51,000 acres is in the Lake Monroe watershed, and this is an area that is a great recreational asset.  We have more than 86 miles of hiking, biking and horse riding trails that includes the places many of you know and probably use on a regular basis – Hickory Ridge, Fork Ridge, Nebo, D, Pate Hollow.  We have plentiful opportunities for hunting and fishing across the landscape.  The watershed also includes much of the Charles C. Deam Wilderness and is also home to the Blackwell Campground and our biggest developed campground, Harden Ridge Recreation Area, which has more than 200 campsites, cabin rentals, picnic shelters, a boat launch and a beach. 

The 51,000 acres of forests that are national forest in the watershed, along with other forestlands, really are our greatest asset in terms of ensuring that Monroe Lake has healthy drinking water for the long term.  However, simply drawing a line and declaring land as national forest or state forest or any other aspect as protected is not enough in order to ensure that we have a long-term, sustainable forest and good quality drinking water.  In light of challenges that are hitting us now and will be in the future – climate change, invasive species and other threats – are really affecting our forests and we can see those changes happening today.  We really do not want to take our forests for granted and we shouldn’t assume that just by leaving them alone, unmanaged, that they’ll continue to provide this great benefit that we all rely on, or that conditions will improve.

We find ourselves today, 60 years after the dam was built, really in a different era of conservation, an era that the impacts and the threats of climate change are altering the approach we have to take, and the reality that we’re dealing with.  Some of those we can predict and some of those will take the form of shocks that we cannot predict in the immediate moment.  In this landscape we have only a limited few thousand acres of very highly fragmented public lands to buffer our resources from these shocks.  We need to stay nimble, we need to be adaptable, and we need to continue to learn from environmental changes and from our management actions in order to prepare our forests to be resilient for when those shocks do come.  Our forests face many threats, as I’ve mentioned, because of the legacy of past land uses.  These forests lack diversity.  They lack diversity in age and stand structure across the whole landscape, and that’s a threat to the viability of our wildlife today.  But it also leaves these forests vulnerable to the impacts of insects and disease outbreaks, invasive species, storms and lots of other unpredictable events that we’re now facing with the changing climate.  Hotter, drier summers, wetter springs, along with more frequent and violent storm events, leave our forests vulnerable and we cannot simply assume or hope that nature alone will ensure a healthy forest for the long term.  We’ve seen significant damage just in the last couple of years from tornadoes and straight-line wind events that have impacted these forests.  We’ve seen an increasing incidence of oak wilt and oak decline, which is threatening those keystone species that are greatly important to our wildlife, but also to our water quality. 

The good news though is that we have some really great opportunities to address these challenges and secure a healthy watershed for the future.  Reintroducing planned and managed fire at a greater scale - this is a tool that Native Americans used for centuries across the landscape to sustain our forest health – will ensure diverse composition, will promote oak and hickory regeneration, and those are species that again, our wildlife are highly dependent upon.  Use of forest management practices that are informed by sound science at a regulated pace that mimics natural disturbances and reintroduces diversity in the age and structure of our forests, really improves the resiliency to the impacts of climate change.  Using proven and effective best management practices and monitoring of our project work really ensures that the short-term water quality from those impacts are protected so that we can achieve those long-term gains in water quality and watershed improvements in the future.  All those actions and more are absolutely critical to maintaining the long-term health of the lake’s watershed.  They all take time, they all take resources, they all take funding and public support. 

This is not really simply wishful thinking though.  There are great examples all around the country of water being well-protected through the use and through the management of forests.  The city of New York actually enjoys some of the highest drinking water quality in the country.  They didn’t get this water quality because they prevented forest management in their watershed.  They got the water quality because they promoted effective forest management.  They did so by investing upstream in the watershed, in tools that would keep the forest healthy and management actions to promote those sustainable uses of forests and keeping forests as forests for the long-term.  Really at pennies to the dollar in terms of comparing the costs of infrastructure for water treatment.  Another great example is Little Rock, Arkansas, where the reservoir they depend on as a water source for the city greatly resembles Monroe Lake.  Over many years now, the local municipality there has worked with their neighboring national forest, with state agencies and with private landowners to promote and partially fund greater use of science-based forest management practices such as prescribed fire and ecological silvicultural practices.  All investments in healthy forests and therefore healthy water. 

Collaborative efforts that are focused on positive actions and positive results, such as the Lake Monroe Water Fund, the Let the Sun Shine In campaign, the Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape, are all great examples of partnerships that are getting off the ground now and are proving to be really valued opportunities for broad collaborative engagement around the health of our watershed and the health of our water.  These organizations help inform the science behind the work that we do and that many of our other partners do on the ground and ensure that those conservation efforts look to stewarding the whole of our forests, not just the public lands, but also with our private landowners who are really important to the long-term health.   

So the greatest asset to Monroe Lake and its watershed may be the forests, but the greatest asset to our forest is an informed and engaged public, ready to work together to take the actions necessary so that a next generation can stand here at the 120th anniversary and celebrate even better water quality than we have today.