Watershed Forestry

Program Purpose

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Clean, fresh water is the world’s most precious natural resource – a resource that is often rooted in forests. Approximately 180 million people in the US depend on forests for their drinking water. Watershed forestry is conserving, restoring, and sustainably managing forested lands explicitly for water resources. While the work is generally terrestrial and may serve multiple goals, watershed forestry helps improve or maintain water quality and quantity.

Sustainably managed forests minimize nutrient and sediment loss, cool surface water temperatures, store water on the landscape, and enhance groundwater recharge. Surrounding and downstream communities benefit, as do fish and wildlife.

Watershed forestry spans the rural to urban spectrum on public and private lands, including working forests. It addresses threats to forests and the clean water they provide include forest conversion or degradation, climate change, and a myriad of forest health issues including invasive species.

How We Work

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We work across Forest Service programs to provide technical and financial support in partnership with other Federal agencies, State and local governments, Tribes, and non-government organizations.

Through these partnerships we:

• Provide guidance for the inclusion of trees and forests in planning for flood control, stormwater management, groundwater protection, drinking water protection, and brownfield recovery.
• Restore, manage, and protect resilient forests, including riparian forest buffers, to benefit watershed function.
• Mitigate landscape-level threats to forests including those from climate change, insects and disease, invasive species, and land-use change.
• Provide guidance on science-based best management practices to conserve soil and water during forestry operations.