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California has about 15,000 watersheds, The State Board is spearheading California's watershed management efforts through its Watershed Manage- ment Initiative. The initiative has four goals: . Encourage and practice comprehensive natural resource stewardship that is balanced with economic and other interests. . Promote voluntary, collaborative decision making at the local level that is open to all stakeholders and seeks to identify compatible interests. . Integrate point source regulatory programs, nonpoint source programs, and other resource management programs on a watershed basis to promote effectiveness and efficiency. . Give more emphasis to reducing the impact of nonpoint sources. Watershed Management Complementing the evolution ot environmental restoration from a single~species focus to a more holistic approach has been the development of the concept of watershed management. For many reasons, watershed management has emerged as the preferred approach to dealing with a host of wateHelated issues, includ- ing environmental restoration. From modest beginnings in the Depression-era effort to control soil erosion, watershed management has matured into a comprehensive tool for planning and management of water- related issues such as pollution prevention, fisheries restoration and drinking water source protection. It gained considerable momentum from the emphasis on controlling nonpoint source pollution in the 1987 amend- ments to the tederal CWA, and again in 1996 with enactment of amend- ments to the Sate Drinking Water Act. EPA describes the watershed man- agement approach as one that provides "a coordinating framework for environmental management that focuses public and private sector efforts to address the highest priority problems within hydrologically defined geographic areas, taking into consideration both ground and surface water flow." A watershed generally is considered to be the land area surround- ing a waterway measured to the highest points that contribute water to that waterway, Thus, all of the activities, not just point sources, that potentially could affect the waterway fall under the watershed management process. Despite improvements in water quality due to federal and state clean water laws, almost 40 percent of waters surveyed in the U,S, in 1994 remained too polluted tor fishing, swimming and other uses, according to an EPA study. Leading causes of water- quality impairment included silt, sewage, bacteria, fertilizers, toxic metals, oil and grease. Recognizing that "command-and-control" strategies were becoming more costly and achieving lower incremental pollution reductions, policy-makers turned to watershed management as an alternative way to address more pollutants and gain greater stakeholder involvement. It was also viewed as a way to integrate previously separate water-related programs within the same watershed. 11 The key to making watershed management's holis- tic approach work is the involvement of as wide a range of stakeholders as possible. Promoters of watershed management stress that it must involve regulators, community groups, dischargers, farmers and others who might be affected by management decisions, Their deliberations should be guided by the best scientific data available on the watershed. Environmental restoration can be a key part of watershed management. Because of its broad out- look and stakeholder involvement, a watershed management approach can integrate environmental restoration into broader planning and management objectives, And with coordinated stakeholder commitment, environmental restoration projects have a better chance of succeeding than if they were stand-alone projects. The Deer Creek Watershed Conservancy is one example of how restoration of a creek's habitat was integrated with other goals for that watershed, A tribu- tary of the Sacramento River in northeast Califor- nia, Deer Creek (along with Mill Creek) is an impor- tant spawning area for spring-run chinook salmon. The conservancy grew out of legislation enacted in 1995, and brought together land owners along Deer Creek, government officials and fishermen con- cerned about a possible listing under the tederal ESA of the spring-run as an endangered species and state designation of Deer Creek as a wild and scenic river. Though the stakeholders had different interests, they were able to join forces to establish a conservancy that improved spawning areas to rebuild the dwindling spring-run salmon population while also protecting the property rights of land owners that could have been weakened if Deer Creek were designated a wild and scenic river.