For Immediate Release: May 26, 2010

Watershed Resources Registry One of Several New Tools for Planners

Managers, planners, and regulators are looking for new ways to coordinate and improve their efforts to protect entire watersheds. The May-June issue of the National Wetlands Newsletter features two articles that feature new watershed tools.

The National Wetlands Inventory has new descriptors to help wetland professionals formulate conservation strategies and assess watershed health, while the Watershed Resources Registry is a pilot project that can help federal, state, and local agencies better coordinate their efforts to achieve ecosystem health using a watershed approach.

Also in this issue:

ELI’s Rebecca Kihslinger teams with David Salveson and Tessa Lee from the University of North Carolina to suggest ways of combining disaster mitigation planning and wetland conservation; priority wetland habitat sites often overlap with hazard-prone floodplains.

Christine Olsenius of the Southeast Watershed Forum examines how a lack of coordination between land use planning, watershed planning, and natural resource protection at the county and city level is preventing better wetland protection. She also looks at ways of improving the capacity of local decisionmakers to understand the value of green infrastructure.

For three decades, the nationally recognized National Wetlands Newsletter has been a widely read and esteemed journal on wetlands, floodplains, and coastal water resources. The Newsletter, published by the highly respected Environmental Law Institute®, analyzes the latest issues in wetland regulation, policy, science, and management through feature articles written by local, national, and international experts from a variety of perspectives.

The Environmental Law Institute® is an independent, non-profit research and educational organization based in Washington, DC. The Institute serves the environmental profession in business, government, the private bar, public interest organizations, academia, and the press. For further information from the Environmental Law Institute, please contact Brett Kitchen at 202-939-3833 or pressrequest@eli.org.
###