Education and Outreach

This Initiative provides a range of watershed education and outreach services to prepare watershed stakeholders and institutions to participate in watershed planning and implementation. Activities include professional training, a watershed management practicum course, and local and regional stakeholder workshops. The initiative is also working with the nationally-accredited Certified Public Manager (CPM) program to emphasize water resources in its certification course. These efforts are laying the groundwork for establishing a professional certification in watershed management. Participants in these programs are eligible for CEU credits. This rigorous stakeholder participation process will emphasize collaborative learning that can be applied directly to watershed planning, and implementation elements directed to improving degraded water quality.

Total Maximum Daily Load and Federal Storm Water Workshops
The Initiative coordinated three professional training workshops for municipal and county staff in the Houston-Galveston and San Antonio areas. These areas are impaired for bacteria and have active TPDES Storm Water Programs. The workshops, which were conducted in Conroe (April 2008), Galveston (January 2009), and San Antonio (May 2009), hosted approximately 50 participants each and presented information on what entities need to do, how to do it and how to pay for it. A fourth presentation, conducted as a follow-up to the Conroe meeting, took place at the Association of Water Board Directors in Corpus Christi (June 2009). Topics, which included a basic overview of water resources in Texas and an overview of the TMDL and TPDES Storm Water Programs, were presented to an audience of approximately 200 participants.

Presentations to the Certified Public Manager Course
The Initiative is developing a professional certification in Watershed Management through the nationally accredited Certified Public Manager (CPM) Program. To lay the groundwork for this, the Initiative presented two 45 minute introductory lectures on water issues to two CPM classes. Each of these presentations was well received, with most participants indicating that the water lecture was an important component of the CPM curriculum. The Initiative’s interim goal is to ensure all CPM graduates receive this basic water lecture. Once the basic demand for this lecture is established, the Initiative plans to work with the current team of instructors to develop and offer a full CPM in watershed management.

Teacher Training in Watershed Management
The Institute has teamed up with the Grosvenor Center at the Texas State Department of Geography to develop and implement professional training for teachers in watershed management. The technology based training will be funded through the USDA and will feature the EPA 9 Element framework for watershed planning as well as numerous watershed management tools developed by the Natural Resource Conservation Commission. The goal of this project is to give young students a practical foundation in real-world watershed management frameworks and case studies.

Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion Educator Network
This project is training watershed educators in the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion to teach their students water quality monitoring, species monitoring (frogs and horned lizards), and range monitoring. The project is working with the Trans-Pecos Water Trust to establish partnerships between schools, master naturalist groups and land owners that not only provide a training site but also produce data to be used for resource management. The Trans-Pecos Water Trust has 3,000,000 acres in conservation status with over 2,000 acre feet of water placed in trust to protect in-stream flow.

School Based Education - Watershed Management Practicum
The Watershed Management Practicum Course aims to train the next generation of water resource professionals in the EPA 9 element framework for watershed planning and implementation. The course also includes a research paper on a stakeholder identified problem in an impaired watershed. The course objectives are currently incorporated into the Global Aquatic Resources class in the Department of Biology. The class will present lectures on the EPA 9 Elements as well as information about 319 funded Cypress Creek Project and the Decision Support System tools that this project is developing. A student from this class will research a problem identified by the Cypress Creek stakeholders. In the Spring 2010, the course will be offered as a 1 hour seminar class with an expanded lecture series and a watershed case study that includes the Upper San Marcos River Watershed as well as Cypress Creek.

Land Water People (November 16-18, 2009) (more information)
The themes of the Fall 2009 Annual Conference emphasizes several components of the Initiative. Four sessions will focus on Initiate themes geared toward capacity building. They include a session on transboundary projects, an academic roundtable, lectures on the valuation of ecosystem goods and services, and an interagency panel to examine opportunities for improved collaboration and integration of programs on a watershed scale.

Watershed Planning Short Course-319 Sub Award
The Watershed Planning Short Course was developed by the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M with Federal 319 funds. The Initiative has collaborated with TWRI on three of these courses by assisting with the assessment and course facilitation.