Author: United States Environmental Protection Agency
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 1507533802
Category: Technology & Engineering
Page: 278
View: 261
The Nation's aquatic resources are among its most valuable assets. Although environmental protection programs in the United States have successfully improved water quality during the past 25 years, many challenges remain. Significant strides have been made in reducing the effects of discrete pollutant sources, such as factories and sewage treatment plants (called point sources). But aquatic ecosystems remain impaired, mostly because of complex problems caused by polluted runoff, known as nonpoint source pollution. This guidance document is intended to provide technical assistance to state water quality and forestry program managers, nonindustrial private forest owners, industrial forest owners, and others involved with forest management on the best available, most economically achievable means of reducing the nonpoint source pollution of surface and groundwaters that can result from forestry activities. The guidance provides background information about nonpoint source pollution from forestry activities, including where it comes from and how it enters our waters. It presents the most current technical information about how to minimize and reduce nonpoint source pollution to forest waters, and it discusses the broad concept of assessing and addressing water quality problems on a watershed level. By assessing and addressing water quality problems at the watershed level, state program managers and others involved with forest management can integrate concerns about forestry activities with those of other resource management activities to identify conflicting requirements and provide balance between short-term impacts and long-term benefits. This approach can maximize the potential for overall improvement and protection of watershed conditions and provide multiple environmental benefits. This document provides guidance to states, territories, authorized tribes; commercial and nonindustrial private forest owners and managers; and the public regarding management measures that may be used to reduce nonpoint source pollution from forestry activities. At times this document refers to statutory and regulatory provisions that contain legally binding requirements.
A Practitioner's Guide to Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation brings together knowledge and experience from conservation practitioners and experts around the world to help readers understand the global challenge of conserving biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems. More importantly, it offers specific strategies and suggestions for managers to use in establishing new conservation initiatives or improving the effectiveness of existing initiatives. The book: offers an understanding of fundamental issues by explaining how ecosystems are structured and how they support biodiversity; provides specific information and approaches for identifying areas most in need of protection; examines promising strategies that can help reduce biodiversity loss; and describes design considerations and methods for measuring success within an adaptive management framework. The book draws on experience and knowledge gained during a five-year project of The Nature Conservancy known as the Freshwater Initiative, which brought together a range of practitioners to create a learning laboratory for testing ideas, approaches, tools, strategies, and methods. For professionals involved with land or water management-including state and federal agency staff, scientists and researchers working with conservation organizations, students and faculty involved with freshwater issues or biodiversity conservation, and policymakers concerned with environmental issues-the book represents an important new source of information, ideas, and approaches.
"This review looks at the Nation's legal, institutional, and economic capacity to promote forest conservation and sustainable resource management. It focuses on 20 indicators of Criterion Seven of the so-called Montreal Process and involves an extensive search and synthesis of information from a variety of sources. It identifies ways to fill information gaps and improve the usefulness of several indicators. It concludes that there is substantial information about the application of such capacities, although that application is widely dispersed among agencies and private interests; which in turn has led to differing interpretations of the indicators. Individual chapters identify a need to further develop the conceptual foundation on which many of the indicators are predicated. While many uncertainties in the type and accuracy of information are brought to light, the review clearly indicates that legal, institutional, and economic capacities to promote sustainability are large and widely available in both the public and private sectors."--P. vi.
