Alabama Watershed Restoration
Although natural events such as fires, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cause significant changes throughout our environment, we generally think of environmental degradation as any unfavorable alteration of our surroundings caused by the activities of people. As our industrialization and population have increased, so has our capacity to damage the air, land, water and biological resources around us-the very resources we must maintain to sustain ourselves. Our environmental ignorance coupled with poor handling, management and disposal of potential environmental pollutants generated through the exploration, development and use of both natural and human-produced resources has resulted in widespread environmental degradation. Like most states, Alabama has its share of degraded ecosystems due to both intentional and non-intentional release of pollutants, which now reside in our land and water resources.
Environmental restoration may be defined as the process of bringing an altered environmental area-whether it be a river corridor or stream segment, wetland area, industrial site, mined area, or a specific watershed-back to a previous condition or position. The process may involve a wide variety of treatment practices that minimize future pollution damage to air, land, water, and/or aquatic and land-based biological resources. Environmental restoration may also extend to physical removal of pollutants from a degraded site or in-situ reduction of pollutant concentrations through physical, chemical or biological processes. Remediation and reclamation are somewhat synonymous with restoration, but remediation usually deals with fixing a specific problem and reclamation often refers to environmental modifications to suit a particular land use, which may have been limited because of natural conditions such as drought. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, for example, was created for the specific purpose of reclaiming arid lands of the Western United States for agricultural cultivation and settlement.
Environmental Restoration in Your Watershed
Everyone who resides or works on the land surface of the earth does so within the boundary of a watershed. This watershed may be part of a bigger and bigger watershed as you go further downstream. Many land-based human activities have potential to degrade water resources. Degradation on a watershed basis can be determined by monitoring the quality of water draining from the mouth of the watershed and comparing it to similar watersheds that have not been impacted by disturbances or pollutants.
To determine if restoration is needed in your watershed to improve water quality, you need to know how severely the water resources are being impacted by pollution. Much information is available from federal, state and local agencies as well as from other organizations and institutions to help you make this determination. Through a water-monitoring program and watershed assessment, you may draw your own conclusions. Even if pollution is not yet severe enough to impact water use, pollution prevention efforts can still be implemented to prevent future problems.
Resources and Programs
Many resources are available for your use in determining degradation levels, restoration needs, and to help you target potential problem areas for pollution prevention efforts.
- EPA's Surf Your Watershed Program can help you locate water problem areas. This site also has links to state water quality data.
- EPA's EnviroMapper web site index provides access to information that can be used to locate potential problem areas for a number of pollutants on a watershed basis.
- You can find information on all hazardous waste contamination sites by county, city or site name in Alabama
- The USDA has a detailed web site on stream corridor restoration.
- EPA's Office of Water, Oceans and Watersheds in association with its Office of Research and Development has an excellent web site on river corridor and wetland restoration.
- EPA's Watershed Academy and Interagency Watershed Training Cooperative provides a web-based training course on stream corridor restoration.
- EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response has a web site on brownfields, which provides some information on how to prevent and restore these contaminated industrial sites to usable conditions. EPA has also established a web site on brownfield remediation technologies.
- EPA's Region 4 Office has established a brownfield initiative to assist in restoring these sites in the southeast.
- EPA has established a web site for locating technologies, which can be used in cleaning up various contaminated media.
- The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management has a web site on environmental restoration.
- The U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement provides information on reclaiming abandoned mining areas.
- The U.S. Geological Survey provides information on restoration of stream water degraded by acid mine drainage through the following web site
- The Environmental Professional's Homepage provides links to many resources designed to meet the needs of consultants and remediation professionals.
- The Society for Ecological Restoration is an international non-profit organization whose goal is to promote the repair of damaged ecosystems.
- EPA's involvement in river corridor and wetland restoration projects in Alabama may be accessed from the following web site
- The Alabama Forestry Commission has established a Partnership for Restoration of Wetlands in Alabama. Information on this program is available through Alabama Treasured Forest Magazine.
Extension Outreach
Auburn University is the home of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES), which develops and delivers programs designed to provide science-based outreach educational into all counties of the state. Professionals in ACES have the capacity to interpret environmental restoration research, which has been developed at colleges, universities or from other sources, and use it in education, training and demonstration programs to solve or prevent local problems related to water quality degradation. Target audiences may range from homeowners and agricultural producers to business owners and resource managers to policy makers.
Research and development of better methods for environmental restoration, as well as teaching and demonstrating the use of these technologies in both the classroom and field, are all basic strengths of the land-grant university system. The primary goal of extension/outreach education programs on pollution prevention is to reduce future environmental degradation.
Extension programs that offer information and resources on environmental restoration include:
Scientific Research
A primary mission of scientific research at Alabama's Land Grant Universities is to develop new and better ways of providing the agricultural needs of Alabama's citizens, while protecting our natural resources for long-term sustainability.
Research on environmental restoration is ongoing at Auburn University and may be found in the following locations:
- Department of Civil Engineering
- Auburn University Environmental Institute
- School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences
- The Center for Forest Sustainability
College and University Education
Courses offered at Auburn University related to environmental restoration may be found in the following departments: