Estimating Additional Water Yield From Changes in Management of National Forests in the North Platte Basin

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One of the more significant issues regarding water yield augmentation is the limited experience we have in applying research based technology at the landscape level in forest and wild land management. The last formal assessment of the potential for water yield augmentation through forest and range management was by the American Water Resources Association in the early 1980's (Ponce 1983). Douglass (1983), Harr (1983), Kattelman et al. (1983), and Troendle (1983) presented regional summaries of the opportunity to increase water yield through forest management based on what was ca 1980's technology. In a summary manuscript, Ponce and Meiman (1983) concluded that the opportunity to augment water yield through timber harvest, as a large -scale land management program, may not be as great as would be implied based on small research watershed results because of the diversity of land ownership patterns and the conflicting physical, biological, and administrative constraints associated with implementation of the technology. However, because of the limited supply and high value of water in the Rocky Mountain West, interest arose in the early 1980's in demonstrating that the water yield augmentation technology, demonstrated to work on small -scale experimental watersheds, such as Fool Creek and Deadhorse Creek on the Fraser Experimental Forest, could be applied at an operational or landscape scale by forest managers and yield similar results. The impetus for the project came from the Regional Forester (USFS), Region 2, whose objective was to develop a water yield augmentation. initiative in the Rocky Mountain Region that would demonstrate an operational application of what was then current research technology. A necessity was to find a significantly large area to demonstrate that research results from small watershed experiments could be extrapolated to the operational level while involving a range of users and interest groups during implementation. Coon Creek was selected as the project area primarily because the watershed in which it is located, the East Fork of Encampment River, was a large, uncut, and non - roaded watershed of the size necessary for evaluating the hydrologic impacts of a commercially viable timber sale. The basin consists of two contiguous watersheds of comparable size, aspect, and timber types, allowing a paired watershed study. The treatment watershed, Coon Creek, could be logged by conventional harvesting methods using standard silvicultural practices (small clear cuts) of the times. t 14 1