How can remotely sensed data complement the Watershed Condition Framework?

The US Forest Service has developed the Watershed Condition Framework (WCF) in order to provide a consistent method for assessing the health of watersheds across the 193 million acres of federal forest lands in the United States. Such assessments are a critical part of prioritizing investments for restoration projects to help improve the health and function of watersheds. These assessments require the development of indicators that capture the essential ecological attributes of several watersheds that are often spanning across a wide geographic region. There are 12 indicators composing the WCF, which currently rely substantially on expert knowledge input. This creates challenges for conducting uniform national-scale analyses and limits WCF's applicability in some regions, since data type and availability varies greatly among regions and individual forests. Thus there are some questions regarding the consistency of the assessment across different watersheds. Advances in remotely sensed earth observations datasets present opportunities for complementing the WCF methodology with nationally available geospatial data. Our goal is to explore the availability of various national geospatial datasets for each of the 12 indicators in the WCF and to investigate the applicability of such data in assessing the condition of various watersheds located within US National Forests.