Watershed Management (Resource Management Strategy)

Watershed management is the process of creating and implementing plans, programs, projects, and activities to restore, sustain, and enhance watershed functions. These functions provide the goods, services, and values desired by the human community that are affected by conditions within a watershed. The practice of community-based watershed management, which is practiced in hundreds of watersheds throughout the state, has evolved as an effective approach to natural resource management. These community-based efforts are carried out with the active support, assistance, and participation of several State agencies and programs.

Managing at a watershed level has proven to be an appropriate organizing landscape unit for the coordination and integrated management of the numerous physical, chemical, and biological processes that make up a river basin ecosystem (Box 1). A watershed serves well as a common reference unit for the many different policies, actions, and processes that affect the system, and it also provides a basis for greater integration and collaboration among those policies and actions.