With community education surrounding watershed health being part of the mission of Headwaters, our organization has recently expanded education efforts. Each Monday for the past several weeks, Headwaters has visited the Outdoor Education class at Letcher County Central High School. Headwaters carries out watershed education and environmental sustainability lessons when working the high school students. This fall, the focus has been the connection between forests and watersheds and why forested lands are important to the well-being of Letcher County waterways.
Forests:
- Reduce storm water runoff and flooding. Trees provide a canopy to catch water, preventing excess water from reaching the ground. Forest root systems stabilize soil, prevent erosion, and take up and store water.
- Absorb pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and particulate matter.
- Reduce and moderate temperature of waterways by providing stream cover and cooling the air.
- Break down pollutants including metals, pesticides, and solvents.
Over the past several weeks students have also participated in dialogue about how forests provide habitat for healthy ecosystems and the resources for sustainable use for a variety of purposes.
This education partnership between Headwaters and the Outdoor Education class will continue throughout the year. The relationship between forests and watersheds will be explored further along with other topics related to watershed stewardship.
***The Resource Library at Bluegrass Greensource has been extremely useful and helped to make this class a success in the early stages. So far we have utilized Forest and Tree ID education kits from Bluegrass Greensource.