RappFLOW receives NFWF Grant for Watershed Planning

(Read the report: Assessing the health and protection of watersheds in Rappahannock County, Virginia: People, Land and Water at the Headwaters of the Rappahannock River Basin)

The National Fish & Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) awarded a Chesapeake Bay Small Watershed grant of $28,500 to RappFLOW and its partner organizations, including the Rappahannock County government. This is the third in a series of NFWF-funded RappFLOW projects over the past four years, in pursuit of a "Model Approach to Watershed Planning" in Rappahannock County.

The project addresses the goals of the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, the Rappahannock River Tributary Strategy, and the County Comprehensive Plan. The long-term goal of this initiative is the protection of watersheds and water quality across Rappahannock County through:

• preservation and restoration of riparian vegetative buffers,
• erosion and sedimentation control, and
• mitigation of land use conversion and fragmentation.

Our approach is to accomplish this through a combination of:

• individual land owner actions,
• cost sharing programs for agricultural, forestal, and residential Best Management Practices,
• local government policies, incentives, and ordinances, and
• incorporation of watershed management plans in the 2009 revision of the County’s Comprehensive Plan.

Our objectives in the coming 18 months are to:

• Integrate scientific, social, educational, economic, engineering, and political aspects of watershed management in ways that work for our people, topography, cultures, land uses, land cover, economy and political processes. Accomplish this within the specific goal of increasing the percentage of riparian buffer area that is protected, preserved or restored to forest cover.
• Engage the full range of stakeholder interests across the County, with support of local, state and regional government and other organizations.
• Increase the percentage of streamside acreage that is forested, through coordination and implementation of all available tools and incentives and relevant organizations and public education.
• Work with landowners and other stakeholders to analyze and understand the health and vulnerabilities in their local small watershed areas; present information to landowners/ stakeholders in ways useful for decision-making; and help landowners to decide upon and implement best management practices for improving our watersheds with special focus on forested buffers for streams and ponds;
• Work with Rappahannock County’s governing bodies to understand, articulate, and enforce public policies and tools best suited to addressing our watershed’s vulnerabilities, with special focus on implementing policies of the Comprehensive plan that address protection of riparian corridors.
• Evaluate the environmental, economic, and political effectiveness of our approach, using quantitative indicators of riparian vegetative buffer preservation and restoration.

This project will enhance our community’s ability to develop an effective county-wide watershed management plan over the next five years. At the same time, we intend for our model to be useful to other similar localities in rural Virginia.

Download full text of grant proposal here (PDF).

For more information, contact Tim Bondelid, Project Director, at
( 540) 987-8693 or timothy@trbondelid.com.