USFS Surface Drinking Water Importance: Forests to Faucets Data

<p><strong>Open the Data Resource:</strong> <a target='_blank' href='https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_ForeststoFaucets_02/MapServer/2' rel='nofollow ugc noopener noreferrer'>https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_ForeststoFaucets_02/MapServer/2</a></p><p>The Forests to Faucets dataset provides a watershed index of surface drinking water importance, a watershed index of forest importance to surface drinking water and a watershed index to highlight the extent to which development, fire, and insects and disease threaten forests important for surface drinking water.</p><p>The Forests to Faucets assessment provides information that can identify areas of interest for protecting surface drinking water quality. The spatial dataset can be incorporated into broad-scale planning, as well as existing decision-support tools that currently lack spatial data on important areas for surface drinking water. This project also sets the groundwork for identifying watersheds where a payment for watershed services (PWS) scheme may be an option for financing forest conservation and management on private unprotected forest lands. In perhaps its most important but most basic role, this work can serve as an education tool helping to illustrate the link between forests and provision of key watershed-based ecosystem services.</p><p>This tabular dataset is meant to be joined with the NRCS Watershed Boundary Dataset HUC-12. The Forests to Faucets layer does not cover Alaska, Hawaii or U.S. Territories. For a full metadata description, visit <a target='_blank' href='https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/edw_resources/meta/S_USA.ForestsToFaucets.xml' rel='nofollow ugc noopener noreferrer'>https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/edw_resources/meta/S_USA.ForestsToFaucets.xml</a>.</p>