The Eagle River Coalition recently released the Eagle River Community Water Plan, the first of its kind. The plan analyzes past, present and expected future conditions of the Eagle River, throughout Eagle County, as well as Gore Creek, Brush Creek and Gypsum Creek, to outline opportunities for improvement as external factors affect the river.
The plan provides a report card for several reaches of the river between Vail and Dotsero, grading current conditions across a variety of variables that include steam flows, water quality and aquatic life.
The Community Water Plan analyzes how anticipated factors such as climate change, increasing urbanization and wildfires are expected to affect the amount and quality of water available in the Eagle River.
The new plan differs from past efforts because it analyzes water quantity in addition to water quality. “The data that this plan highlights really shows that we’re going to have reduced flows in the Eagle River moving forward,” said James Dilzell, executive director of the Eagle River Coalition.
The Community Water Plan also provides concrete projects designed to protect and improve the health of the Eagle River based on the priorities of local stakeholders.
Why create a new plan?
“We are looking down the pipeline and seeing a future where there is less water in the stream, and that is going to be challenging for a multitude of reasons,” Dilzell said. “But there are things we can do now, in terms of restoration projects, better management, prioritized projects, that can help alleviate that concern.”
While the Community Water Plan cannot solve every problem facing the Eagle River watershed, its analysis promotes the most effective opportunities for action to protect the river. Protecting stream flows becomes increasingly important as compounding issues decrease water quality and quantity at an escalating rate.
For example, increased urbanization and population growth lead to more contamination. “With lower flows, there’s less water to dilute that pollution from entering the streams, so kind of a multifaceted challenge of protecting water quantity and water quality as we see less water,” Dilzell said.
Creating the plan
The Eagle River Community Water Plan originated with the release of the first Colorado Water Plan in 2015. The statewide plan requested that local basins develop their own local water management plans to help guide future decision making, land use and restoration efforts in watersheds, Dilzell explained.
The Eagle River Coalition, then the Eagle River Watershed Council, started applying for grant funding in 2017. Upon receiving funds from the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2018, the initial research phase for the Community Water Plan began by connecting with stakeholders and identifying key elements of river use in Eagle County.
“We wanted to understand on a more-broad scale what our community values related to our rivers, so we did outreach to understand where our community thinks that we should be looking to protect our watersheds,” Dilzell said.
Identified community values include preserving fish supply for angling, enabling adequate irrigation for agriculture and protecting existing ecosystem function for biodiverse species.
The next phase of creating the plan revolved around modeling varying futures of the river, a process that took several years. The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District provided a model that localizes state-level water model, through which potential futures can be displayed in the context of the Eagle River.
“That model takes a look at the four scenarios, so climate change, urbanization and population growth, water rights development and transmountain diversion potential,” Dilzell said. “We took the values that our community had communicated with us and understood how those would be impacted within the change scenarios that our watershed could face.”
How to read the plan
The Community Water Plan is full of data that took seven years to collect and can be overwhelming at first glance.
“Although a technical document, this is meant for everyone, and we wanted this to be as accessible as possible,” Dilzell said.
Dilzell recommended starting by examining the scorecards available in both the online and PDF versions of the plan, which narrow the analysis to smaller reaches of the Eagle River. The smaller scopes of the scorecards enable people to look at their favorite stream reach, their local stream reach, or the one they rely on the most and learn about its past, present and future.
“Those scorecards are telling us what things look like now, what historical degradation, human impacts or natural environment are allowing this reach to be at its current state, and then what those future scenarios will impact moving forward,” Dilzell said. “This provides a nice, place-based framework for what’s going on.”
Within the report card, categories of river health are graded from A to F for their current level of impairment. The impairment scale refers to the amount of alteration the river has undergone from its original state —an “F” indicates that the river has been so profoundly altered that it is no longer supporting its intended function.
The report card then analyzes the expected future conditions of the river health categories across a variety of different potential future scenarios, selected because they were identified as the top impacts to Western watersheds.
Each feature is assessed with an arrow, which are all “really specific to the function and to that variable and sub-variable,” Dilzell said. In other words, a positive arrow does not necessarily mean a positive overall impact on the river.
Taking action
In addition to analysis, the Community Water Plan provides opportunities for action to protect and improve the health of the Eagle River. “I think the most important part of the watershed plan is that it’s not just a bunch of data that says ‘good luck, figure it out,'” Dilzell said. “We do have a pretty robust list of management objectives, so things that we want to prioritize as a community, in terms of those objectives, things like recreation, agriculture, wildlife and biodiversity, and then from those objectives we developed an initial projects list.”
The Community Water Plan pushes objectives that can be adopted by local governments to “add resiliency to the stream,” Dilzell said.
Many of the projects listed are large-scale restoration efforts, such as increasing the tree canopy and shading along the river to support the wildlife and biodiversity that rely on current stream temperatures. “We are seeing already higher temperatures in the river, and with lower flows that are likely coming with a variety of future conditions, that might get worse,” Dilzell said.
Recreation infrastructure and management are another priority of the plan’s initial implementation, to preserve the river for recreation even in the face of future changes. “We recognize that with population growth, we are going to have more recreational users on the Eagle River, and in those future use scenarios there will be potentially less water and more challenging conditions for aquatic life,” Dilzell said.
Fully implementing the recommendations of the Community Water Plan requires community participation. “We have an opportunity now to do work to protect our rivers. We can create this resiliency by taking action, and this plan does provide an initial road map for us of what we need to get done as a community right now to do that,” Dilzell said.
To explore the Eagle River Community Water Plan, visit WaterPlan.EagleRiverCo.org.
