Social and Economic Values

Our objective was to develop a consistent nationwide assessment of risk of impaired watershed condition for the nearly 4000 5th-level (10-digit) watersheds containing National Forest System (NFS) land in the contiguous 48 states. This assessment is broad-scale and relies on nationwide data sets. It is intended to inform decisions on where to focus future, more in-depth watershed assessment, which would in turn help in determining where watershed protection actions would be most effective. The assessment ranks 5th-level watershed condition by national forest, NFS region, and water resource region.

To view the following PDF files, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free of charge from Adobe's website.

A. Description of the Risk of Watershed Impairment workbook (RWI.xlsm)

The workbook RWI.xlsm lists the basic data on stressors and at-risk resources, computes the values of risk of impaired watershed condition of the watersheds, and summarizes those values. In RWI.xls, users can easily change the weights and compute new scale values and corresponding risk levels, rankings, and quantiles, as well as tables and graphs summarizing the results.

Data Download

You can download RWI.xlsm here (revised December 8th, 2010). It is a large file (56 MB) that may take some time to download depending on the speed of your connection.

B. Risk of Impaired Watershed Condition by NFS Unit

This section contains tables with detailed results of the assessment of risk of impaired watershed condition by NFS unit for watersheds with NFS land in the conterminous U.S.

C. Incidence of Threatened and Endangered Species by NFS Unit

This section contains two tables showing the incidence of T&E species by NFS unit.

D. Maps of Indicators

These 21 figures depict the values for each of the 3672 watersheds for the indicators.

E. Maps of Whole Watershed Risk Levels

These four figures depict whole watershed risk level for the 3672 watersheds for selected summary scale values based on the full set of indicators.

F. Maps of Risk Levels for Non-wilderness NFS Parts of Watersheds

These nine figures present risk levels for non-wilderness NFS parts of watersheds, for all three problems together.

G. NFS Unit Scale Values by Region

These eight figures present graphs of scale values for the non-wilderness NFS parts of the NFS units of each region showing the contribution of the three problems towards the summary scale value for the unit.

H. Comparison of NFS and non-NFS Lands

The workbook RWI compare.xlsm compares levels of indicators and levels of risk on NFS lands with corresponding levels on non-NFS lands. Briefly, the Combine sheet reproduces the relevant information from RWI.xlsm for the two sets of land areas and the Compare sheet compares by watershed the levels of indicators and of risk for all watersheds with both NFS and non-NFS land.

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U.S. Department of Agriculture
Forest Service
Rocky Mountain Research Station

Assessing Watershed Condition