This project was funded by a Capacity Support Grant from the MWCC Watershed Fund.
Project Description
The purpose of this funding was to advance our goals of enhancing the Big Hole’s water availability through natural water storage. While we have accomplished important projects in specific locations over the years, we are missing a coherent plan that can scale techniques that we know work. A few years ago, we began to conceptualize a direction forward for water storage at scale by focusing on HUC-10 level planning. This project provided the capacity for us to do some important mapping, planning and communicating to better hone in on the best places in our landscape to install projects for water storage of all kinds.
We assessed and mapped wetland creation sites, beaver dam analog and low-tech meadow storage locations, and dam and reservoir locations. We also conducted an extensive water-rights review of the entire watershed to summarize the waterways with most demands for irrigation. Our Executive Director delivered a presentation to a large stakeholder base charting out the various directions we could take as a group to store water on the landscape. We engaged with 35 stakeholders at this meeting, kicking off a years-long running conversation about storage opportunities throughout the watershed. BHWC has decided on an all-of-the-above strategy and is actively pursuing projects of all kinds while simultaneously developing a comprehensive Watershed Restoration Plan laying out this conservation direction the organization can follow for the next 10-15 years.
The summaries produced by this project form the foundation on which our Watershed Restoration Plan will be developed. To frame our water storage analysis we went back to a cost/benefit study BHWC commissioned years ago that compared the relative storage gains and costs of different management actions on private lands. Interestingly, that study found that beaver translocation provided some of the best cost/benefit scenarios. That study also identified stream reaches with high potential for translocation. We vetted those with the USFS and added them to our running list of project locations for further ground-truthing.
Project Outcomes and Impacts
BHWC accomplished the following with Watershed Fund Capacity Support funding:
- Engaged 300 community partners
- Summarized water rights at the HUC-10 and individual stream scale throughout the Big Hole Watershed
- Engaged 15 landowners in six tributaries of the Big Hole
- Strengthened relationships with federal and state agencies and land managers, including securing funding for natural water storage projects on public lands
- Created a map of natural water storage opportunities throughout the Big Hole Watershed