Iowa Riversheds Blog

The Iowa State University Extension began the Performance-based Watershed Projects to:

1) Replicate a practical model developed by Iowa State University Extension for facilitating the formation of citizens’ watershed councils in agriculture-impacted watersheds.

2) Engage citizens in participatory discovery — through education, water monitoring and on-farm demonstrations — to facilitate local consensus about water quality problems and standards of economic, social and environmental performance against which potential cost-effective solutions for those problems can be measured.

3) Demonstrate research-based, practical tools for on-farm measurement of the environmental performance of soil and nutrient best management practices, and conduct a model producer incentive program for their progressive implementation.

4) Facilitate citizen councils’ leadership in drafting comprehensive watershed management plans.

In short we are working to create community led watershed groups using a bottom up approach to  improve water quality.

We started this blog to allow people easy access to articles related to our work and water monitoring.  If there is something you are interested in seeing let us know we are open to suggestions.