Katie:
Hi everybody. I’m Katie Newcomb. We have a great webinar for you today.
First, we’ll hear about the sustainable recreation framework. Then, we’ll talk
about the sustainable recreation design guide. Then switch gears a little bit and
learn about the water-estimating tool. I’m happy to introduce our first speaker,
Rachel Francina. Rachel is a recreation planner for the integrated resource
enterprise team, and she’ll be talking about the Framework for Sustainable
Recreation. Rachel, whenever you’re ready.
Rachel:
Thanks Katie. Yes, my name is Rachel Francina and I work with integrated
resource and enterprise team and we have been working closely with the
Recreation Heritage in Wilderness folks in the Washington office for the past two
years around the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. My presentation today
is just going to do an overview of what the framework is and hopefully answer
some questions about what it means to you. Next slide Katie.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Isn’t this just another initiative?” You may
remember the recreation agenda that came out, it’s been probably about 12
years ago now. I hope that after this presentation and discussion you’ll see that
the Framework for Sustainable Recreation is more than initiative and more than
just a recreation strategy. We feel like it’s a shift in the way the agency manages
recreation resources. That shift is to contribute to social environmental and
economic sustainability. Not only on the national forest but also to society as a
whole. Next slide.
This presentation is going to cover several aspects of sustainable recreation
including the evolution of the framework itself, components, what’s in it, what’s
in the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, integration of the framework in
the larger Forest Service, some of the lessons learned from some forests and
regions that have been testing and piloting and using the framework and then
what the shift and what the change really is and what it means to the agency.
Next slide.
We’re all familiar with the issues that recreation managers are facing these days,
loss of connection to national forest, deferred maintenance, trail erosion and the
shift from a timber-based economy to a recreation and tourism economy. The
issues are not getting any easier to deal with and in fact I’ve heard some people
call them wicked issues. They require us as recreation managers to develop new
approaches to deal with them. Next slide.
The evolution of the framework in the idea of sustainable recreation really began
when Arthur Carhart was hired in 1919. His work and his vision included the first
forest-wide comprehensive recreation plan in the nation for the San Isabel
National Forest in southern Colorado. This plan provided a thorough and
practical framework for how the Forest Service could provide a set of solutions
to address the booming outdoor recreational needs of the public in the national
forest and particularly around the community of Pueblo, Colorado. Decision and
foresight is how the Forest Service can address the need for the public and what
it continues to provide. It continues to provide us perspective and inspiration
today for sustainable recreation. Next slide.
This vision is embodied in the [inaudible 0:03:49] tagline for the Framework for
Sustainable Recreation, which is renewing body and spirit, inspiring passion for
the land. This really comes directly out of that quote you see on the slide from
Arthur Carhart. We believe that we can address many of the nation’s modernday issues with this new perspective. It frames our belief and hope and
expectation around the benefits that recreation provides to the American public
and to the land. It’s the cornerstone for the Framework for Sustainable
Recreation. Next slide please.
The vision also frames the six principles that are in the Framework for
Sustainable Recreation. At first the principles are kind of simple, things that we
really already think about. Sustainability, community engagement, larger
landscape and integration but it really requires a shift in the way work in thinking
about things from a holistic perspective and how everything is connected to each
other. The goal values really emerge from over several years of people talking
about what was most important. There was a meeting five or six years ago
where a group of people from across the country first came together and started
talking about what recreation meant to them and how we can kind of start
making that shift. From that, these six core values emerged and evolved.
I’m just going to touch on a couple of them first. Connecting people with their
natural and cultural heritage. It’s really one of the core cornerstones of the
framework is making sure that people know about their public lands and the
opportunities that they provide not just recreation, but we all know that many
people first connect to public lands in the outdoors through recreation
opportunities.
Promoting healthy lifestyle, that’s an interesting one because a lot of people,
particularly in the Forest Service, we don’t think about health and wellbeing as
part of something that we do. Yet when we look at what’s going on around us
health is such a big part of it. People in communities are doing lots of different
things, trails and open spaces to make sure that the communities have
opportunities for healthy lifestyles. We’re a part of that because we’re
connected to our communities.
I probably don’t have to say much about the interconnection with sustainability.
We all know that is core to our mission in the Forest Service. This is just
reiterating that sustainability is what’s driving recreation and everything else we
do.
Community engagement is essential for creation sustainable recreation.
Community engagement of course is very strong in a new planning role, and one
of the things that we’re going to talk about a little bit later is the shift from us
being doers to the Forest Service being planners, facilitators and conveners and
tapping into the energy and creativity of people and engaging them for the
benefit of public lands.
Manage national forests and grasslands as part of the larger landscape. Again,
this is about looking at the bigger system and what else is going on around us as
public lands, open spaces, private uses as well. This really ties in with the
America’s Great Outdoors initiative and other things like that where we want to
look at all land and I would add with the community engagement, all hands
approach.
In the integrate recreation we’re deeply into the Forest Service mission. The
recreation program, it’s about contributing to sustainability not just about the
recreation program itself being sustainable but contributing to that larger
sustainability on the national forest and working together with other programs
to figure out what that means and how we maximize that contribution. Next
slide.
The framework also has ten focus areas. I’m not going to go into detail on each
of these focus areas. These focus areas provide really the fundamental building
blocks for establishing sustainable recreation program on a forest. The intent is
for the focus areas to guide the work that the regions and forests do. Not that
each region or forest is going to spend time on each of these focus areas but to
pick where they have the most energy and the most leverage and to spend time
on perhaps focusing on one or two of the focus areas. For example, Region 4
recently has been working on a draft recreation strategy and the workforce as
well as special places as some of the focus areas they’re going to spend some
time on. Next slide.
How do you take the vision, the principles and the focus areas and apply them at
the local level to your region, your forest and your community? Really,
sustainable recreation in some ways is part of what we’re already doing. The
framework provides that guidance as a framework does of kind of what we can
hang our hats on. As I mentioned, Region 4 has been taking some action as well
as may other regions. Region 9, for example, is focusing on community
engagement and has developed an engagement model for sustainability in using
recreation and tourism as kind of that catalyst to begin those discussions, that
dialogue about sustainability; I’m going to use the word region in the little r
sense.
For example the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois has been working
with communities in and around southern Illinois to develop a common vision
and goals for the forest and other outdoor recreation and tourism providers to
work towards. What Region 9 is calling it is Community Engagement Through
Recreation and Tourism or CERT, because we all have to have an acronym of
course. Region 3 is currently working on a regional recreational strategy that will
provide guidance to the forest in that region and Region 10, while they haven’t
done a specific strategy for the region, they are also encouraging the two forests,
Chugach and the Tongass, to work with individual communities around the
forest to come up with common vision and goals for recreation and tourism in
several communities, [Rengal 0:10:38], Sitka, Yakutat and now there is some
work going on in the Chugach area have been doing that.
The new planning rule actually does define sustainable recreation and that
definition is the set of recreations the settings and opportunities on the National
Forest System that is ecologically, economically and socially sustainable for
present and future generations. Many aspects of the planning rule overlap with
the principles of sustainable recreation. The all lands, all hands approach,
community engagement, connecting people to nature. Having the framework
helps shape and strengthen sustainable recreation in the planning rule. They will
kind of work on at the same time and the folks in the WO certainly used what
was in the framework to help shape what went into the planning rule.
Another aspect of integration, integrating the framework into the Forest Service
is around using volunteers. Using volunteers and getting people out into the
forest is really what’s going to help us be relevant to the future generations. It’s
critical to the success of the whole agency and there’s an opportunity to take
what the framework goes out to and figure out how it integrates with being
relevant to you. There are several forests, one that comes to mind the Coronado
National Forest is working with their communities, the school district other
public lands and has developed the Sky Island Children’s Forest. The goal is to
make the public lands relevant to the youth. There is a new national youth
strategy, volunteer services strategy and that connection is really strong.
Another, kind of final, aspect of integration is climate change. Obviously it’s a
big deal and the Forest Service is really … We’re trying to figure out what that
means to us and how we manage our national forests in the face of huge impacts
of climate change. Recreation is obviously connected to that. One of the
obvious connections is ski areas and how the use of ski areas is going to change
in the winter if we’re not going to have as much snow or even more snow in
some cases. We have an opportunity to model who to operate our site in a
sustainable way through greener operations. Recreation is a portal to connect
with the public. If recreation isn’t relevant then other areas of the agency won’t
be relevant either. Next Slide.
As I mentioned, there are several regions that have been kind of framing how
they’re going to approach sustainable recreation as well as individual forests
have been developing recreation strategies, engaging with their communities.
Several forests are looking at their recreation sites and figuring out, because
that’s their biggest cost centers, figuring out how to make those more
sustainable. These lessons learned come from those forests that have been
exploring sustainable recreation over the last couple of years.
One thing I wanted to note is that sustainable recreation is not really a process
or a model. There is not a right or wrong way to do it. These lessons are really
just some of the ah-hah moments that forests have had. There are some
similarities in those. There is a draft framework implementation guide that’s
been floating around out there for the last year or so and several forests have
been kind of using that, refining, testing and that will eventually be kind of put
out there so that others can use it as well.
Most forests want to know where they stand before going out to the public.
Most often this has been looking at costs of recreation site and trail
infrastructure, operation and maintenance costs because that is typically where
most of the money is going to. Some forests have also done a situation
assessment to understand how recreation is or is not contributing to
sustainability and where they have the most leverage to move. I mentioned the
Coronado. They decided youth was their leverage so they started the Sky Island
Children’s Forest. Another example would be the Prescott National Forest
where they had some very involved communities in and around the Prescott and
Camp Verde and all those communities down there and they’ve been working
with those communities developing trail plans, coming up with common goals
and things that they can all work on together.
However, while it’s good to understand the current situation, there is also a
tendency to get stuck in that analysis, paralysis. It’s important to start working
with stakeholders and partners early and often. Several forests have started
smaller community engagement often by talking with other outdoor recreation
providers and then expanded the we as a common vision and forum. This was
not typical public engagement around the [inaudible 0:15:58] project. Rather it’s
about dialogue to understand different perspectives and to work towards
common goals. It does take the dialogue and the talking, which can take time
and for example I’ll go back to the Shawnee as well. They started working on
this in 2009. It’s been almost four years and they’re still working with
communities and they’ve built great relationships but they found that it took a
lot of time to get there.
People often ask about what the process is for sustainable recreation. As I said,
there’s not really a process or a cookbook. It really depends on what you want
to do. You need to engage where you’re at. Some forests have very engaged
communities and have been working closely with them to identify recreation
needs and opportunities and other forests are just beginning to work and to step
into that world. One of the first things you need to do is to identify the scope
and scale and with others define what sustainable recreation means. Next slide.
I’m not seeing it yet, but maybe it’s coming up. I’ll go ahead and get started.
This is probably obvious but sustainability is an anchor for implementing the
Framework for Sustainable Recreation. By that I mean that all three tiers, social,
ecological and economic must be given consideration and work together. Often
in the Forest Service and in other land management agencies we focus on the
ecological side of things and don’t spend as much time on the social and
economic, but it really takes all three tiers to get to the sweet spot of
sustainability. Another less is to look through the lens of possibility. Often we
get disheartened by the lack of funding and staff and we feel like we can’t do
anything new, but when we look through the lens of possibility and we’re open
to new ideas many opportunities appear that we haven’t thought of before.
The point is not that we do everything for everybody but that we explore what
can be done together. One of the key lessons is that once you start talking about
sustainability it quickly gets bigger than recreation. We start with recreation
because it is the portal through which most people connect to their public lands,
however, sustainable recreation is truly about recreations contribution and
influence on sustainability at the forest and community level. Integration at
those scales is critical. It’s important to start where you can and use that
leverage but to think about how it all connects to each other.
In initial conversations, many forests have pushed back on the idea that agency
has a role in physical health. I mentioned this kind of at the beginning with the
principles. There is so much evidence that having access to open space and
public lands significantly increases people’s health. The Shawnee again is a good
example, and they’ve been working with their healthcare community in southern
Illinois and doctors are even now starting to write prescriptions to get out into
nature, nature prescriptions.
I’m not going to go into green operations very much, but we all know it’s more
than about recycling. You’re going to hear from Jessica about the sustainable
recreation design guide and how those principles can be brought in from the
very beginning into the design of recreation sites. It encompasses much more
than recycling, and it’s about getting people involved into sustainability
discussions. Next slide.
What is the change? What’s the shift we’re really talking about? Like I said
there’s not a recipe for sustainable recreation. It’s about looking at our work
and seeing how we can contribute. Many forests are doing great things and
working with partners and engaging communities. [Inaudible 0:19:56] the
framework is that shift in perspective. No matter the size or the scope of the
project the “we” or working with the partners is a driver for the work that we’re
doing using this all lands, all hands approach. Our role changes from being a
doer to being a catalyst, a convener and a participant. While sustainability is our
mission, it really is that container and the lens through which all of our work is
done.
It’s about more than protecting the environment. It encompasses all three
spheres holistically. Once we in recreation recognize the power of doing our
work through the lens of sustainability we also recognize that our role in
delivering the agencies mission is different. Without sustainable recreation,
there is not a sustainable Forest Service. With that we can begin to understand
that learning and adapting are the only ways to be successful as an agency. Next
slide.
With the introduction of the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, it’s been out
for a couple of years now. It came out in 2011. Again, it’s part of being that
learning organization and figuring out what that shift and that change means.
It’s an ongoing process in evaluating, adapting and making adjustments as need
be.
That’s just a quick overview about what the Framework for Sustainable
Recreation is about. Again, Jessica is going to go into some kind of putting that
into practice with the sustainable recreation design guide. With that, I will end
my presentation. Thank you.
Katie:
Thanks so much Rachel. That was really informative. We have a couple of
minutes for one or two questions if you have any questions for Rachel. You can
type it into the notes on the webinar or presents *1 on your phone. Emily, I’ll
just wait and hear if anyone has any questions from you.
Emily:
I am not seeing any just yet.
Katie:
Are you able to stick around for the rest of the presentation in case people have
questions later?
Rachel:
Yes, I am.
Katie:
Okay. Great. Thanks so much. All right it sounds like there aren’t any questions
at this time. We’ll move on to our next speaker. I’m happy to introduce Jessica
Dunn, a landscape architect in Region 3 and she’ll be talking about the
Sustainable Recreation Design Guide. Jessica, whenever you’re ready.
Jessica:
Okay. Thanks Katie. This is Jessica. I hope everyone can hear me okay. I’m a
landscape architect here in Region 3 and the southwestern region, and basically
I’m a regional resource. I work on projects throughout our region based on a
need for landscape architecture services for both design and planning projects.
Next slide.
I’m excited today to talk about the SRDG, which is the Forest Service’s
Sustainable Recreation Design Guide. As Rachel mentioned, we love our
acronyms. We think we got a pretty good one, and we’ve been working on this
project, spearheaded out of Region 3 since 2012. It’s a really exciting, cutting
edge project that intended to link a lot of the theory of many of our agency
mission and directive into practice in the field. Today I’ll just be giving a
background, a brief overview of our project’s progress to date, what our vision is,
our objectives, goals and content. Next.
The SRDG is really inspired by the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, which
Rachel did a great job of describing. This new strategy for management of
forests lands identifies that we’re at a critical turning point as an agency with our
shrinking budgets, increasing visitor demands for quality recreation and
integrated recreation settings. Because of this increased demand we can really
no longer manage as we have in the past. One of the questions we had was how
to relate the framework to the field since sustainability does underlie all of our
program decisions.
Also, we’ve been really inspired by the forest service implementation guide for
the framework and we’ve really worked a lot with Rachel and tied in with the
team that’s developing the implementation guide and we sort of talked about
what role the SRDG would fill in companionship with the implementation guide
and we really feel like the implementation guide is focused on the big picture of
forest service management, developing partnerships, protecting heritage
resources, developing a sustainable financial foundation, but there still is not yet
that instruction for field level folks available. That’s the role that SRDG is
hopefully going to fill.
In addition, we have the new planning role and new directives coming out that
really focus on sustainable recreation and ecosystem services and the
importance of these, also scenic character, recreation opportunities. Those are
all [inaudible 0:25:10] directives. FS2300 is being updated to reflect our focus on
sustainability.
Additionally, we have a lot of work being done in the private sector and in the
larger design and planning world at large. Many efforts have been undertaken
to incorporate sustainability into project design and implementation and green
design and sustainable methods are now really every day best practices. We
have lead, the leadership and energy and environmental design rating system.
We have the guidance of federal agencies and sustainable practices for design
landscapes which actually came out of the federal government for federal
facilities, and we also have the sustainable sites initiative, which is basically the
landscape architecture take on the lead system. It basically allows you to walk
through a series of performance benchmarks and ratings to give a project a
green rating.
One of the things we did when we first started the SRDG was we tried to walk a
Forest Service recreation site project through the sustainable sites initiative
outlined rating system and it couldn’t even rate out because a lot of the
benchmarks and the initial performance requirements we weren’t even able to
meet. For example, we don’t really use irrigation on a lot of our sites. A lot of
our sites are remote so we couldn’t tap into multimodal transportation, these
sorts of things. That kind of really showed us we needed something specific for
what we do in our unique national forest management. Next slide.
Since 2012 we submitted a proposal to the Technology and Development Center
and it was picked up. We’ve been working in tandem with them on this project.
We’ve also been supported by the Washington office and partnered with
multiple internal organizations such as sustainable ops, which has been a really
great supporter in helping us pick up detailers to assist with the project. We’ve
assembled a team of Las and engineers nationwide to help with the creation of
the document.
We have a core team and we have a group of consultants. It’s really a
nationwide effort. SRDG really allows us to develop a sustainable design guide
that shows our commitment to sustainability in the agency. It’s a cutting edge
project. It’s timely. It allows us to be proactive instead of reactive by integrating
sustainability methods up front and it also puts us on par with other government
agencies and private industry advances in the field of sustainability, which are all
shown on the slide there, the sustainable sites which I mentioned and lead and
the National Park Service has also done a lot of great work in this field of
sustainability.
Also, more importantly, the SRDG allows us to fulfill our mission, which is
outlined in our new planning role and directive helping us to ensure that our
recreation settings and opportunities are ecologically, environmentally and
socially sustainable for present and future generations. It puts us in the mix of
other progressive action oriented work that’s happening worldwide in
sustainability and it exhibits to our public our commitment to our mission and to
sustainability. Rec sites and settings are often the first and only interaction the
public has with our agency. We have this potential to foster stewardship
through ecorevolutory design and raising awareness about sustainable methods
and design.
The SRDG provides us the opportunity to become leaders and champions and
sustainability in the Forest Service. Next slide.
What is the SRDG? Since the pickup of the project by the Technology and
Development Center we really worked on articulating a clear vision for our
project. We held a great visioning session in September 2012 in Phoenix,
Arizona and we actually had face-to-face interaction at this visioning workshop,
which was great. We had our consultants come in. We had people from the
Washington office, a couple of different regional offices as well as field going
landscape architects and engineers and some private sector consultants come in
and we spent a day talking about this project and where it should go. We really
identified a clear vision and a clear direction after that meeting.
The SRDG will be a national guidebook of best practices and processes for
implementing sustainable recreational design. It will not be a prescriptive
document but instead a set of guiding principles, a collection of expectations,
questions and broad approaches that can help designers incorporate
sustainability into recreation planning and design projects. We really feel like
keeping it as a set of guiding principles is integral to keeping the document’s
integrity and allowing for constant updates in sustainability advancements. With
the SRDG we really want to focus on sustainable outcomes instead of more
dogmatic prescriptive guidance in order to foster innovation and progress. It will
really be a fluid, constantly moving document. Next slide.
The goals of the SRDG, the main goal of this project is to produce a resource for
field level recreation designers and planners. Your landscape architects, your
engineers, your recreation staff, field-going folk. It’s tailored to the unique
assessment and management needs of our National Forest landscape, i.e.,
what’s sustainable in the city is not necessarily so in the forest. A lot of times we
have remote locations that automatically makes our product inputs and outputs
expensive and environmentally consumptive and complicated. How can we
develop a guidebook that addresses these issues that are unique to us?
Additionally, the resulting guidebook will provide the necessary metrics to apply
the principles of the Framework for Sustainable Recreation and specifically three
of the focus areas when constructing new or rehabilitating existing Forest Service
rec developments and sites. The three main focus areas that we’re working
underneath are restore and adapt recreation settings, invest in social places and
implement green operations. As I mentioned, we’re really interested in
connecting the ideas and theories that are outlined in the framework into the
practice of every day. Next slide.
Our objectives with the SRDG are to provide field-level guidance for
incorporating sustainability practices into our rec planning and design processes.
This guidance document could be a companion document to the Forest Service
BEIG, Built Environment Image Guide, and references many existing Forest
Service efforts and assisting direction to date. It will align our best available
sustainability science to the uniqueness of our outdoor recreation management
and settings and really promote that the best design is sustainable design in our
day and age. Next.
A key factor in our project development has been identifying our audience. The
audience for the SRDG includes field-level designers landscape architects,
engineers, project managers, recreation staff and recreation planners. This
guidebook will be designed for project level planning and design at the ranger
district and forest supervisor office levels. It’s not really tailored for a regional
office project level planning, but it can be used as a general value and a general
reference for all other levels of Forest Service staff. It’s really tailored for on-theground projects. Next.
In looking out how to structure the document of the SRDG, we put together sort
of a very simple side outline that you see here to show how the guidebook will
address sustainability factors at each major step of the design and planning
process. Looking at sort of the process you would follow as you go through
designing a campground or designing a [inaudible 0:33:04] site you have your
initial planning [inaudible 0:33:08] stage when you develop a design narrative
and an engineering report. Then you move into design, then you move into
construction and implementation in the case of the [inaudible 0:33:17] or
rehabilitation projects. That obviously would be more on the implementation
side, then operation maintenance, post-construction monitoring and end of life
cycle decommissioning.
The idea is to ask sustainable questions and include sustainable guidance for
reach step of the planning and design process. Each of these bullets that you see
here. The guidebook will provide questions and principles regarding
sustainability inserted into the appropriate steps of the design and planning
process and will provide an agency foundation for sustainable best practices and
recreation overall. Next slide.
Just to give you an idea of our timeline. I’m sorry it’s a little small on the screen.
Hopefully it’s showing up a little larger. What we’ve done to date and where we
are, we have completed our articulation of the project vision and developed a
cohesive project proposal and chapter outline. Now, we’re in a stage of
performing a comprehensive literature review to identify applicable knowledge,
information and information gaps. We’ve swooped out a number of articles,
books, reports, best available science and currently our core team is going
through all of that and deciding what’s relevant, where we have gaps, where
more research is needed.
Then, we’ll move into using, well we sort of are still, using a collaborative,
interdisciplinary, information sharing process to collect best available knowledge
and agency case studies. Right now we’re working on trying to find good case
studies as well as pilot projects. The difference being case studies being projects
that we can use while we’re developing the SRDG to really point out where
different principles that are outlined in the SRDG are being used in that
particular project and pilot projects being the [inaudible 0:35:08] projects down
the line that we can just the run from start to finish we can use SRDG for the
entire design and planning process through a pilot project.
Starting, hopefully later this year and going into fiscal year 2015 we’ll be
generating content and writing chapters. Simultaneously we’ll be reviewing,
testing and editing the content. This is really where San Dimas Technology and
Development Center is going to come in and help the core team with the writing
and the reviewing as well as the final formatting and publishing and distributing
the document. Our goal is to start that final formatting and publishing and
hopefully get into distribution by mid fiscal year 2015.
Then, of course with every agency document we will move into a publicizing and
implementation stage, doing presentations at national conferences, developing
white papers and particularly focusing on training. How to make this guidebook
part of everyday practice, how to really help incorporate it into existing suite of
tools that they’re already using and design and planning projects. Next.
I guess that completes my presentation. Again, this is a broad overview of what
we’re doing on the SRDG, but I’m happy to answer any questions you might have
about the project.
Katie:
Thanks so much Jessica. As a reminder, if you have any questions press *1 on
your phone or you can type it into the webinar under the notes.
Emily:
Not seeing any questions, yet.
Katie:
Okay. We’ve got a quiet group today. I don’t see any on the notes either.
Jessica, are you able to stick around until the end in case people have questions
for you?
Jessica:
Yes.
Katie:
Okay. Great, thanks so much. With that, we’ll move to our next speaker. We’re
going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the water-estimating tool. Sarah
Baker, an environmental management systems program manager in Region 3
will be talking about this. Whenever you’re ready Sarah.
Sarah:
Thank you Katie. This is great. Before I start I’d like to say something about the
SRDG and about the framework. I’m really, really excited to be working with
Recreation on this. Jessica and I are working together on the SRDG, and I think
that as an engineer for the Forest Service for the past 20 something years I’ve
realized that we are so busy at the field that we don’t all have time to consider
all the possibilities of what we could be doing better, and I think that’s where the
SRDG is going to come in. I’m very excited about that.
What I’m actually here to talk about today though is our water estimating tool.
It’s something that started out with looking at water use in buildings, but it could
also be applied to recreation. For those who are here today because of the
recreation point of view, I want to share the recreation possibilities with you too.
If you can go to the next slide for me Katie.
What are we talking about? This tool is, as a friend of mine says, is not rocket
surgery. It’s something basic that we’ve put together in an attempt to start
understanding our water footprint for the agency. It’s a simple spreadsheet
when you look at the tool itself. It’s designed to work with Infra, our database,
so that we can pull information out of Infra, plug it into the tool and spit out
what we hope will be a water footprint for the systems that we don’t have any
way of measuring water use on. That’s what we’re doing.
It’s based on FEMP, which is the Federal Energy Management Program, on their
water estimating techniques. It’s based on a real average number. We have
some ways to finesse that, and I’ll share all that with you in a very quick manner
so that you understand what’s available. Then you can let me know I guess if
you want a copy of it, but you can also be aware of what’s coming out. We’ll be
looking at trying to do something with this nationally to help people understand
what their footprint is. If you go to the next slide please.
What does this do? What we’re trying to do is estimate the water use in a
building or at a site based on the type of building or the type of site, the number
of people that use it and the number of days that the water is used. It’s pretty
basic information. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s pretty basic. That’s all
we’re trying to do with this tool. Next slide please.
I want to give you an idea of what the information we’re basing it on is. These
are values from the FEMP web site, which is actually taken from the American
Waterworks Association, 1996 estimating quantities. What it is, is that each type
of building or type of site has an estimate for how much water we use. These
factors, as I said came from 1996. One thing you have to be aware of is that
water use changes as our habits change in society. We want to use the newest
numbers we have, but these really are the ones that are the widest ranging for
different types of buildings, different types of sites we have a use.
For example, the first one, in an airport the average passenger uses three gallons
per water per day. Each day that somebody is there you’d estimate three
gallons of water use. Pretty basic simple stuff. I want you to be aware that also
we have our own water-estimating gauge here in the Forest Service Handbook
740911. In section 4411, exhibit 1, we have some estimates for water use that
are based on, some of them, things that we’ve measured in the Forest Service.
They’re very specific. It’d be things like campgrounds, day-use areas, different
types of dwellings that we generally have and other miscellaneous sites. Some
of these coordinate really well with FEMP and others don’t. Others are more
specific.
When you’re looking at this tool for recreation, specifically, I would really look
closer at adding in the factors from our handbooks. Just wanted to throw that in
as information. Next slide please.
How does this help? One of the things you may or may not be aware of is we’re
looking at trying to reduce our water use. We report our water use based on
what we pay for. In the Forest Service we have a lot of sites where we produce
the water. Those sites are not necessarily metered or if they are nobody is
actually reading the meter. We have quite a bit of water that we’re not
reporting when we start talking about the quantity of water the agency uses.
What we’re trying to do here is estimate the water use for those places. The
good thing about this is it gives us an opportunity to know what we’re doing as a
baseline or at least to start estimating what we’re doing in order to be more
efficient. How can you tell if you’re being more efficient in a building if you don’t
know how much water you’re using.
Once we use the estimating tool to come up with an estimate of how much
water we’re using we can then compare that to what we actually use. Let me
show you what it looks like on the next slide. This output is pretty basic. I’ve
had to take a long line off a spreadsheet and chop it into pieces so you can see
what the columns are, but this is designed to pull data out of Infra and then
dump it into this spreadsheet. The data that comes out of Infra is not all shown
here. It’s a little bit in bits and pieces. Unfortunately, we can’t get all of it in one
place in Infra, but if we could put all this in, fill all this information in we would
get at the bottom our regional water use, or site water use or whatever you
want to use it for, for the year. That’s the idea. Next slide please.
Here’s our problem. Those of you who work with Infra probably are very well
aware of this. First of all, we can’t get all the required information for this tool
from one table in Infra. For example, we have a water table where we have the
systems that we own and how many days they’re operated and what the status
is. Then, we have the buildings table where we have information on the number
of employees that are in the offices. The pieces of information that are missing
are things like the number of people who use our bunkhouses or the number of
people who work in a warehouse all day. We don’t have those. Those are some
of the missing pieces of data for this tool.
In rec sites we do have a lot of really good information on the number of people
who use the rec sites. You can go through and use that number and go through
the calculations of here’s the high season, low season averages, put those
numbers in and then estimate how much water is used at that site. Next slide
please.
Let me give you an example. This is one system. This is the background
spreadsheet that spits into the one we already saw. For the Sandia District
office, as you see below the line in the top part of this, there is one water system
that feeds all of these buildings. If we look at the buildings, the only one we
actually have numbers on, and it’s number of employees, is the office and
unfortunately of course it was put in several years ago and may or may not be
accurate, but that’s where we have the numbers.
If you go to the next slide, we take that information roll it up and put it into one
line of that final spreadsheet. You’ll see the Sandia District, their water system
which is either operating for 365 days a year or 261 depending on which part of
the database you use and has 45 employees, then it’s estimated to use 176,000
gallons of water per year. Next slide.
Why do we care about this? Really good question. Last year we reported that
we purchased 26 million gallons of water in the agency. In Region 3 where I’m a
little bit more familiar with the water systems, just using the data we have,
which is not by any means all of it, we’re estimating somewhere around four
million gallons more that we use that we don’t report on. When we start looking
at how much water we’re using and how much we want to reduce, we’re not
looking at the whole amount. I’m thinking at this point from the data I’ve seen,
especially in Region 3, we have less than half of the system with numbers of
personnel and we have no outdoor water reported on here yet, because it’s
something that’s not in our database.
We could be looking at 20% of our water use is going unreported and
uninvestigated. Next slide. That’s not the only reason that we care. We really
want to be able to highlight the issues and the places where we want to work
first to reduce our water use and one of the things that really always resonates
with me is that we’re estimating in this country that 14% of the indoor water use
is attribute to leaks. If you don’t know if your system is leaking you won’t know
to fix it. One of the ways we can tell if it’s leaking is to use the estimate for the
water use and if we have a system that is metered, look at the meter and
compare the two. We could use this tool even for those where we pay for water
and have a quantity to see if it’s really in the ballpark of where it should be.
One of the other things I think is really interesting, a lot of people tend to be
more concerned about energy use than water use and part of that is because our
water is so cheap in this country right now. If you realize that in a municipality
35% of the energy a municipality uses is used for water and wastewater
treatment systems. By reducing our water use we could be reducing our energy
use and therefore our greenhouse gas emissions quite a bit. Next slide please.
I just want to leave you with my contact information. If you have questions or
thoughts or something you’d like to know about the water estimating tool and
you don’t think about it today, please e-mail me. It’s a very simple method of
estimating our water use, but it’s something that you can use for yourself. For
your forest, for your district, for your building. It’s also something we’re going to
be trying to use on a more national level to look at our overall use, but that’s
something we’ll be working on for the next couple of years. Are there any
questions?
Emily:
Sorry Katie.
Katie:
Go ahead.
Emily:
I was just going to say once again if you’d like to ask a question you can dial *1 or
send a note to presenters.
Katie:
While we’re waiting for people to call in with their questions, there is actually
one note that I’ll read aloud for you Sarah. It says the climate change impact is
currently estimated … I think this is partially based on what Rachel said and then
it’s a question about the water-estimating tool. The climate change impact is
currently estimated to reduce the snow season at Lake Tahoe from five months
to one by the end of the century. If ski areas attempt to pump more
groundwater to make more snow, which may be rained off during former snow
months, the probability of effectively mining the groundwater resources looms
as a possibility that would dry up the forests and their streams beginning the
unraveling of the bionet. Please comment on how well the water estimation
tool might address these situations. I know it’s not exactly, but I thought you
might have some good comments for that.
Sarah:
I’m happy to comment on that. I think maybe Rachel will want to also.
Katie:
Okay.
Sarah:
The water-estimating tool won’t really help us resist that urge to mine the
groundwater, but it would help us figure out how much we’re using in some
places where we may be mining the groundwater without realizing it. I think
that’s part of the key here is that we’re talking about our own internal
operations. It could also be used for our partners and for those who have special
use agreements with us when they’re estimating their water use. Ski areas I
realize is a very special thing not included in the FEMP tool I must admit. I think
that’s really part of sustainability, what we’re talking about here is looking at
how we use all of our resources and finding the thing that really works the best
for everyone and for environment. That’s the key. It’s a really good comment I
think.
Emily:
Rachel, would you like to say something?
Rachel:
I’m not sure I could respond to that. I’m certainly not a climate change expert. I
think it is a really good comment and something that should be brought up in
particular to the folks who are climate change experts to see what their take is
on that.
Katie:
Thank you both. I’m not seeing any other questions over notes. Emily, are there
any over the phone.
Emily:
No questions.
Katie:
Okay.
Emily:
We’ve got a very quick group here. They’re very quiet. I love it.
Katie:
I know, very quiet. I’ll just highlight the next peer learning webinar. The date is
wrong on the screen, I apologize. It’s July 3rd, Wednesday, July 3rd at 10:00 a.m.
Pacific, and we’ll be talking about the NetZero guides and the pilot studies they
completed this year as well as hearing about what the [inaudible 0:51:27] team
is working on. The link on the right side of the page is the peer-learning schedule
for the rest of SY13. Just one more call for questions. Press *1 on your phone If
you have any questions for any of our speakers.
Emily:
It looks like we do have one.
Speaker 1:
Am I connected?
Emily:
You are.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Hi. This is Joey [inaudible 0:51:55]. I was just going to ask if the old
estimates that have been out there for water usage are just out of date. We’ve
continued over the years to use I think 250 gallons a day for a family of four, and
I think that came out of the old Public Health Service Guidelines that EPA
adopted. Are those just out of date now or what would you recommend?
Sarah:
I believe those have been updated. I know we used that number for quite a long
time. I think they’re getting more specific now to the number of people actually
in the family and coming up with an estimate based on more recent
measurements, but still recent is relative. The numbers we’re using right now
from 1996, that’s still quite a while ago unfortunately.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Sarah:
I’m trying to keep my eyes open and look for the newest numbers coming out,
but they are sort of coming out as a hit or miss thing and they’re also being
looked at regionally, which I think is not a bad thing. I know that we use
different amounts of water in the west than our cohorts in the east do. I think
it’s something we may want to break up into regions eventually if we can get
good data.
Speaker 1:
I didn’t catch the number that was on the table quick enough. I was just kind of
skimming through seeing what they were, but is there one for an individual in a
home on the forest and roughly how much is that these days? How many
gallons is it?
Sarah:
That’s a really good question. The funny thing about this is that FEMP didn’t
come up with that number. I had to go find it other sources, and what I found
was I found the EPA’s number which they’re using now as 70 gallons per person
per day.
Speaker 1:
That’s pretty close. If you take four times 70 you’d get 280. That’s pretty close.
Sarah:
It’s pretty close, and you figure it’d probably be less than that for four because
really if you start looking at clothes washing and those major water use things it
would not be the same amount multiplied by the number of people.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. No, I was just curious if it was really a big change, and it sounds like maybe
this water saving device might shift it a little. Okay. Okay thank you.
Sarah:
You bet.
Emily:
I am not seeing any further questions.
Katie:
Okay thanks. I don’t see any on the notes either. So thanks so much to our
speakers. You guys gave great talks today, and thanks everyone for listening in.
If any of your colleagues would like to tune in this webinar was recorded and will
be available on the Sustainable Operations Collector SharePoint site. Thanks
again to the speakers, and everybody have a good day.
Sarah:
Thank you Katie, and thank you Emily. We appreciate the help.
Emily:
You’re welcome.