Oregon
Program Year: Two
Client: Water Quality Division (Department of Environmental Quality)
Click here for Oregon's Final Report (PDF).
State-identified Need: A better mechanism for determining where and with whom (which landowners) to focus resources and assistance that will best support upstream provision of clean water for public water supply areas.
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| Drew's Valley Ranch, Oregon. Photo: Ethan Jewett |
Methodology: Project partners worked with a technical advisory team to develop, evaluate and weight criteria for each of three goals: land conservation prioritization for drinking water protection, land restoration prioritization for drinking water protection, and land prioritization for habitat conservation opportunities. Project partners and the technical team identified, collected, and refined more than 40 data layers needed to assess and illustrate these criteria.
Uses: The resulting landscape analysis tool can be used in several ways besides its primary purpose of showing where communities should prioritize investments of limited resources in order to meet the goals of source water protection and habitat conservation. These include:
- Voluntary land conservation and restoration—Land conservation specialists can review the maps and reach out to landowners to see if they are willing to sell or donate land that can be managed for water quality benefits and habitat conservation. Technical service providers can review the maps and offer landowners resources to help them employ best management practices on their lands.
- Guidance for land use regulations—The GIS tool can inform local government planning and zoning decisions so that they better protect drinking water sources.
- Prioritize pollution control efforts—The tool can be used to prioritize places to improve existing pollution controls and management practices to address risks to public health through drinking water, recreation and fish consumption.
- Minimize risks from natural disasters—Data layers showing the flood zone and vulnerable soils identify some of the lands most vulnerable to natural disasters. Their locations may be useful to decision makers who identify priority areas, and plan for prevention, treatment needs, mitigation and/or alternative water sources.
- Track water quality improvements—With some added features, the GIS tool's land use information, together with DEQ's existing monitoring data, could be used to track implementation and effectiveness of best management practices (BMPs) for source water protection, and point towards potential improvements.
FOR QUESTIONS:
Kelley Hart(415) 495-4014, ext. 201
Elizabeth Schilling
(202) 207-3355, ext. 41