Contact: Eliot Hurwitz FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
5/8/96
What can you do to help restore the coastal environment? A comprehensive new guidebook just published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides California residents and groups with the scientific and organizational information they need to protect and restore their valuable community watersheds.
Watershed Restoration: A Guide for Citizen Involvement in California was developed and complied by William M. Kier Associates of Sausalito with a grant from the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program.
The guide encourages individuals--from homemakers to elected officials--to become actively involved in finding ways to assure that the watershed they live in provides for sustainable development and balances resource use and resource protection. The guide focuses on habitat restoration for salmon and steelhead trout.
"The Coastal Ocean Program has published this document to help people understand their roles in the ultimate management of coastal resources. The program believes that coastal watershed restoration is an important aspect of improving coastal resources, that it is best accomplished when citizens are actively involved in the process, and that this effort deserves the best available science and technical tools," said Donald Scavia, director of the Coastal Ocean Program.
Watershed Restoration briefly reviews the condition of California's coastal watersheds and profiles successful watershed protection efforts. It explains why government efforts are not sufficient and why citizen action is essential for successful watershed protection and restoration. Outlining technical challenges that must be addressed, the guide provides sources for scientific and legal information. Finally, it provides organizational and networking information to encourage its readers to join efforts to make their watershed better serve this and future generations.
Watershed Restoration is part of the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program's Decision Analysis Series, a group of documents designed to bring the highest quality scientific information on priority topics in a user-friendly format to coastal resource managers. It is the first in the series to be directed at a broad public audience.
Copies of the document are available from the following sources:
California State Water Resources Control Board
Division of Water Quality, Nonpoint Source Unit
(916) 657-0687
William M. Kier Associates
Sausalito, California
(415) 331-4505
NOAA
Silver Spring, Maryland
(301) 713-3338
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NOTE: Watershed Restoration: A Guide for Citizen Involvement in California can be found on the Internet at: http://hpcc.noaa.g ov/cop/pubs/das8.html Information on the Coastal Ocean Program can be found at: http://hpcc.noaa.gov/cop/cop-home.html Information on the California State Water Resources Control Board can be found at: http://www.swrcb.ca.gov All NOAA press releases, and links to other NOAA material, can be found on the NOAA Public Affairs World Wide Web home page, http://www.noaa.gov/public-affairs. If you'd like to receive these releases by electronic mail rather than fax, please send an e-mail to: jslaff@hq.noaa.gov