Who owns watersheds

Alteration of natural flow regimes e. Unfortunately not. Healthy watersheds are uncommon, particularly in the eastern U. Large tracts of protected wildlands, mostly in the western U. However, some healthy watersheds exist in many regions of the country where water pollution has been prevented or well controlled, and where communities maintain the benefits of their clean waterways. Healthy watersheds not only affect water quality in a good way, but also provide greater benefits to the communities of people and wildlife that live there.

A watershed — the land area that drains to a stream, lake or river — affects the water quality in the water body that it surrounds. Healthy watersheds not only help protect water quality, but also provide greater benefits than degraded watersheds to the people and wildlife that live there. We all live in a watershed, and watershed condition is important to everyone and everything that uses and needs water.

Healthy watersheds provide critical services, such as clean drinking water, productive fisheries, and outdoor recreation, that support our economies, environment and quality of life. The health of clean waters is heavily influenced by the condition of their surrounding watersheds, mainly because pollutants can wash off from the land to the water and cause substantial harm. Streams, lakes, rivers and other waters are interconnected with the landscape and all its activities through their watersheds.

They are influenced by naturally varying lake levels, water movement to and from groundwater, and amount of stream flow. Other factors, such as forest fires, stormwater runoff patterns, and the location and amount of pollution sources, also influence the health of our waters. These dynamics between the land and the water largely determine the health of our waterways and the types of aquatic life found in a particular area.

Effective protection of aquatic ecosystems recognizes their connectivity with each other and with their surrounding watersheds. Unfortunately, human activities have greatly altered many waters and their watersheds. For example:.

The great majority of these involve pollution sources in their watersheds — the land area that surrounds and drains into these waters. Knowing the conditions in watersheds is crucial for restoring areas with degraded water quality, as well as protecting healthy waters from emerging problems before expensive damages occur.

The fourth-largest watershed in the world, the Mississippi River watershed, reaches from the Allegheny Mountains in the eastern United States all the way to the Rocky Mountains in the West, encompassing regions from 31 states and two Canadian provinces in its drainage area.

When you hit "enter" a map will appear on the left with an outline of the watershed in which you live indicated with a dotted line. On the upper right-hand side, above the blue strip, there will be the zip code you entered, accompanied by the name of the watershed just below that.

Surface water is just that—water that collects on the surface of the earth. This category is composed of rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, wetlands, estuaries…the list goes on!

Beyond the Great Lakes, part of the remaining surface water of the US is found in the country's some 3. Throughout history, human communities have sprung up around available surface water resources—some of the world's earliest cities for which we have records were formed around estuaries, which are surface water bodies where freshwater sources like rivers or lakes mix with the saltwater of the sea think about the Chesapeake Bay, the Pamlico Sound, the Mississippi Delta, or the San Francisco Bay.

This trend carries through to today—many major US cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, DC formed near surface water bodies just as the metropolises of the past, because of the valuable services and resources they provide.

Groundwater is the other half of the moisture equation contained in a watershed. Groundwater is water that occupies pore space in the rock and soil layer beneath our feet, filling natural underground storage areas called aquifers.

Groundwater slowly moves through these aquifers, going on to feed into surface water sources like lakes, ponds, rivers, and even the ocean. Over half of the US population relies on groundwater for residential uses, with the country drawing an estimated Public supply is a water source that is used to provide water for 25 or more people—think of a water tower. Is surface water more your speed? Click here to find your state on this list , and read about wetlands located in your state.

Report back on your state, and the name of or type of wetland found in your state in the field below. Many different organisms and communities depend on the water of a watershed, but in order for this water to be useful for the vital functions outlined above, it must have good water quality. Water quality is a term used to describe how well-suited water is for a particular task, such as drinking, irrigation, transportation, recreation, etc.

This suitability is determined by certain physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the water and the surrounding area, and includes measures such as temperature, dissolved mineral content, or the number of bacteria present.

Water quality standards are enforced by the states and the US Environmental Protection Agency, and different standards apply depending on the intended use of the water—for instance, if water in a stream has a high temperature, it can still be drawn to be used for toilets and showers in a city, but that water may not be suitable for aquatic plant and animal populations that would prefer cooler temperatures in order to stay healthy and thrive in that river.

For that reason, the river may not be described as having good water quality for fish and wildlife living in that water body. The quality of a water body is impacted by the surrounding watershed, including dry areas where you may not be able to immediately see a water body.

Pollutants can be carried from land areas and into nearby waterways when it rains, which can be particularly troublesome in developed or more urbanized areas.

In the process, this stormwater can pick up any trash, soil, debris, or chemical contaminants that it encounters. Heavy precipitation events can lead to a decrease in water quality by washing these pollutants into local waterways.

In extreme cases, waterways can be threatened with more than just the trash found outside. The first generation watershed programs focused on soil conservation and catchments protection of reservoirs while second generation watersheds focused more on water conservation and improvement of irrigation and moisture conservation.

Successful watersheds projects which emerged in early s, such as Ralegan sidhhi, Adagaon and Pimplalgaon Wagha in the state of Maharashtra, and Sukhmajori in Haryana as well as, PIDOW Participative Integrated Development of Watersheds projects in Karnataka laid a foundation for participatory approach in watershed development.

These projects also proved that stakeholder participation could lead to better development and management of natural resources and promote village development processes by ensuring appropriate technology choices and incentives for sustenance at farmer level, institutional arrangements for management and maintenance at village and community level.

This is mainly due to the lack of clarity about the groundwater issues in National Water Policy and watershed framework, which lead to transmit that, the person who owns the piece of land has have a full ownership right to use as well as exploit ground-water under his piece of land as well as from neighbouring land. This much complicated linkage of ownership rights to land and groundwater-use is important policy and institutional issue in watershed development.

When the water rights are linked with land rights, private investment in water use may lead to depletion of groundwater resources. Understanding this linkage is also important because, individual choices have collective consequences in the watershed framework. Even in landholders group, action of one group of stakeholders in one location affects adversely or favourably on other groups of stakeholders in a different location within micro watersheds.

Often these different stakeholder groups and locations have conflicting objectives with respect to their investment priorities and enterprise choices, for example rain-fed farmers show much interest in on farm or land related watershed treatments as farm bunds, land levelling and contour bundings where as irrigated farmers interest is much upon waters harvesting structures or treatments helping to raise ground water table such as Check dams, earthen bunds, village tanks, and farm ponds.

Resource poor, specifically landless people only expects some investment in watershed plus interventions such as loans and other livelihood supports, because generally except labour opportunities in project implementation phase they do not find any direct benefit of land and water based watershed treatments.

So, the assured rights to resources as water and land, at least to newly generated resources are important incentives and concerns for the all type of stakeholder groups including resource poor to undertake watershed development work. In National Water Policy, the issues such as, clarity on the rights to groundwater as well as surface water and complete recognition of the rights of communities to manage water resources through collective action are missing completely.

Despite this, surface water is seen and widely accepted at community level, as common pool resource, and generally most of people irrespective of caste, class and gender, except few cases have access to surface water. Thus by and large surface water is commonly agreed as public good in its limited sense.

Thus, in the absence of appropriate regulatory mechanisms and institutional arrangements for distribution of benefits across households including the landless, the private landowners capture the irrigation benefits from increased availability of groundwater. Due to this unjust rule about linking water-rights to land-rights, landless and resource poor are thrown out from benefits of the ground water, and our traditional approach of water conservation in watershed development becomes questionable in equity and sustainability background of watershed benefits.

When rights are properly defined and secured, there is an incentive to invest on fixed assets and optimally allocate these for enhancing productivity and augment income. It is therefore important that the interest of all households in the Watershed is protected and equal rights of regenerated natural resources are accorded to encourage them to participate in conserving these resources.

The current watershed framework and approach as well as water policy fails to address this important issue in watershed management. Groundwater in India has registered phenomenal growth and development in recent years because of some specific reasons.

The highly variable nature of rainfall makes groundwater the most popular alternative for irrigation and domestic water use across India and this dependence on groundwater resources is particularly critical where dry season surface water levels are low or where wet season flows are too disruptive to be easily tapped. Groundwater source of water is also economically cheap, quicker to tap and is more productive than even canal irrigation system.

It can be applied exactly when it is required to its extent for the crops. It gives the security to the farmers and confidence on the vagaries of weather. Also, it gives full irrigation to arid and semiarid regions and seasonal supply to other areas to supplement irrigation. Agriculture remains central to the Indian economy and it therefore receives a greater share of the annual water allocation.

For major part of the India, especially rural India, groundwater is the most significant source for drinking, domestic, livestock and livelihood support needs of the people.

The increasing depletion of water resources, in particular groundwater, has led to the realisation that existing rules concerning the use of groundwater were unable to respond to a situation of water scarcity. As a result, the central government has put significant emphasis on the development of groundwater laws by the states.

Furthermore, the IIMI estimates that India is using its underground water resources at least twice as fast they are being replenished. Legislative interventions concerning groundwater are significant for two main reasons. Firstly, from a legal perspective they constitute a major organised attempt at redrawing the rules concerning control and use of groundwater, which is still otherwise largely based on common law principles that make it part of the resources a landowner can use largely without outside control.

Besides legal frameworks, a number of common law principles linking access to water and rights over land are still prevailing in India. These include separate rules for surface and groundwater. With regard to surface water, existing rules still derive from the early common rule of riparian rights. The basic rule riparian right framework was that, riparian owners had a right to use the water of a stream flowing past their land equally with other riparian owners, to have the water come to them undiminished in flow, quantity or quality.

In recent times, the riparian right theory has increasingly been rejected due to its inappropriate basis for justifiable and equitable water claims. Further, common law rights must today be read in the context of the recognition that water is a public trust. If this principle is effectively applied in the future, it would have important impacts on the type of rights and privileges that can be claimed over all type of water, including groundwater.

Common law standards concerning groundwater have existed longer. The basic principle was that access to and use of groundwater is a right of the landowner. In other words, it is one of the rights that landowners enjoy over their possessions. Further, the rapid lowering of water table in most regions of the country has called in questioning legal principles giving unrestricted rights to landowners over groundwater.

Similarly, the growth of concerns over the availability of drinking water in more regions has led to the introduction of social concerns in groundwater regulation.