Program Plan to Assess Watershed Conditions

Through the Natural Resource Challenge, the NPS Water Resources Division received a base increase to conduct Watershed Condition Assessments on a system-wide basis. Watershed Condition Assessment (WCA) involves applying a set of descriptive and/or quantitative technical methods to describe ecosystem health at the watershed scale. Typically, these methods develop and integrate assessments of discrete ecosystem components at a variety of landscape scales. Over the past 10-15 years, researchers and managers have developed numerous WCA methods for use in various ecosystems, and for a wide range of purposes. A constant element in all of the methods is the use of watershed areas to define landscape-level scales.

The field of resource condition assessments is relatively new and rapidly expanding. There are no widely accepted definitions, approaches, or “methods” for conducting structured, replicable assessments of watershed resources, and a wide variety of methods are available depending upon such things as the assessment purpose or use, habitat type, scale, and degree of quantitative rigor. The first challenge for this new program is to define the concept of watershed condition assessment for the National Park Service and to develop a framework and context for the systematic assessment of park watershed resource conditions. Additionally, sufficient guidance to parks is needed to identify and select appropriate methods to meet individual park needs.

As part of this program a project was recently initiated in cooperation with the Chesapeake Watershed CESU and George Mason University (GMU) to identify, review, clarify, evaluate, and develop a compendium of the many published methods for assessing watershed conditions in general, as well as the broad-scale conditions of various watershed resources such as wetlands, uplands, streams, and riparian resources.