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In Oregon, a mobile toolkit helps promote healthy ecosystems and protect community drinking water. By Danielle Dumont T o continue supplying high-quality drinking water to rate- payers, many municipal utilities are looking outside the box. Miles beyond the walls of their drinking water facili- ties, they are focusing on protecting the water supply at its source and discovering that new technology can play an increas- ingly important role in restoring the forests and streams within their service areas. For example, the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) in Eugene, OR has spent the last four years working with a number of partners and landowners on a program to protect healthy riparian — or streamside — forests around its sole source of drinking water for more than 200,000 residents. EWEB's Voluntary Incentives Program (VIP) focuses on protecting approximately 9,500 acres of riparian forestlands along the McKenzie River and its tributaries. Under the VIP, landowners with property in the area that meets specific standards for ecologically-functional riparian areas can qualify to receive annual payments and other incentives in return for long-term protection agreements. Landowners who do not meet these standards for compensation can still enter the VIP to restore degraded riparian areas and may be eligible for protection incen- tives once standards are met. Into The Woods Healthy riparian forests, consisting of a mix of rushes, grasses, shrubs, and trees, provide a suite of benefits for downstream water users. These benefits include flood mitigation, erosion control, pol- lutant filtration, and water-cooling shade, in addition to providing habitat for salmon and other regulated species in western states. In 2014, EWEB and its partners began a pilot project to test the VIP concept with 15 landowners. The results of the pilot are informing the feasibility of a full program implementation in 2016. Part of the pilot includes the development of riparian vegetation survey protocols and standards, as well as testing The Freshwater Trust's StreamBank® Monitoring app, a digital data collection tool for surveys. The Freshwater Trust is a nonprofit organization that protects and restores freshwater ecosystems using science, technol- ogy, and incentive-based solutions. "StreamBank Monitoring is being used to assess and quantify the level of function in riparian forests affecting EWEB's source water," said Olivia Duren, riparian analyst for The Freshwater Trust. "With the data from StreamBank, EWEB can make recommendations to landowners for protecting high-quality woodlands and floodplains or restoring degraded areas." StreamBank Monitoring is part of the larger StreamBank pat- ented toolkit of web-based and mobile applications for watershed restoration planning, monitoring, and tracking. StreamBank allows municipalities, utilities, and conservation partners engaged in source water protection to better understand the economic and environmental returns of restoration projects. "StreamBank has evolved since 2007, when we first developed a version of it to help streamline grant funding and permitting for watershed restoration projects," said Alan Horton, managing direc- tor of The Freshwater Trust. "Since then, we've continued to expand and adapt the platform to meet the needs of various projects and partners, including time-saving tools for characterizing streamside vegetation function for source water protection programs." StreamBank Monitoring is a popular tool in the StreamBank toolkit. It is a tablet-optimized app for collecting project data in the field and compiling that data for analysis and reporting. There are nine features in the app, including vegetation monitoring, riparian function assessments, shade measurements, photo point monitor- ing, redds surveys, and substrate monitoring. "The StreamBank Monitoring app is built on a monitoring protocol that is flexible enough to be used for various projects but also specific enough to be especially useful for vegetation moni- toring," said Sharon Gordon, ecosystem services analyst for The Freshwater Trust. "This places the app squarely in between simple, out-of-the-box monitoring apps and custom-made apps that aren't easily transferrable to other types of data collection." A Look In The Toolbox The StreamBank Monitoring app is geared toward riparian vegeta- tion actions. It features a user interface designed to mimic workflow in the field and provide a visual record of tasks completed to help organize efforts on-site and avoid data collection omissions. The built-in validation rules help ensure that data collection is complete and that values are within an expected range. It's possible to carry forward relevant data from previous sampling events (e.g., location latitude and longitude) to maximize efficiency. The menu selections significantly speed up data collection versus written notes, which also improves data quality by helping ensure that all users are documenting site conditions in the same way and direct- ing attention to all major factors, such as browsing by wildlife, that could damage plantings. A quantitative vegetation monitoring feature is compatible with a wide variety of protocols and common metrics; for example, the app is flexible enough to allow the user to 34 wateronline.com n Water Innovations Source Water Protection: There's An App For That