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News, Notes & Events |
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May 2008 - Rapid Watershed Assessment of the Otter River Watershed
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The local Natural Resources Conservation Service, (NRCS) Office has
received the go ahead to do a "Rapid Watershed Assessment" (RWA) of the
Otter River watershed. The RWA will provide initial estimates of where
conservation investments would best address the natural resource
concerns of the landowners, conservation districts, the KBIC Tribal
interests, and other community organizations and stakeholders within
that watershed.
The RWA process is the direction for the future of watershed studies for
the USDA - NRCS. RWA's usually take about 1.0 to 1.5 years to produce
and the vast majority of the aquired watershed knowledge is digitally
stored and presented in a "layered" fashion. In the past, the older 319
watershed studies took 2.5 to 3.0 years to complete and they were just
about entirely composed of narrative statements, charts and lists with
an occassional photo image. The new digital format, with the much
smaller written narrative section, may well have more data contained
within it and will be completed three times faster.
The Otter River 166.2 Sq. Mile or 106,350 acre watershed study will take
about one year to do. This RWA project was one of two selected from the
State of Michigan for funding and will begin shortly.
Hopefully, in the future, given the new Farm Bill parameters, more and
more watersheds in our area and throughout the State will have these
studies completed on them leading to greatly increased resource
knowledge of our local natural environment.
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