Katie: Hi everybody. I’m Katie Newcomb. We have a great webinar for you today. First, we’ll hear about the sustainable recreation framework. Then, we’ll talk about the sustainable recreation design guide. Then switch gears a little bit and learn about the water-estimating tool. I’m happy to introduce our first speaker, Rachel Francina. Rachel is a recreation planner for the integrated resource enterprise team, and she’ll be talking about the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. Rachel, whenever you’re ready.

Rachel: Thanks Katie. Yes, my name is Rachel Francina and I work with integrated resource and enterprise team and we have been working closely with the Recreation Heritage in Wilderness folks in the Washington office for the past two years around the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. My presentation today is just going to do an overview of what the framework is and hopefully answer some questions about what it means to you. Next slide Katie.

Some of you are probably thinking, “Isn’t this just another initiative?” You may remember the recreation agenda that came out, it’s been probably about 12 years ago now. I hope that after this presentation and discussion you’ll see that the Framework for Sustainable Recreation is more than initiative and more than just a recreation strategy. We feel like it’s a shift in the way the agency manages recreation resources. That shift is to contribute to social environmental and economic sustainability. Not only on the national forest but also to society as a whole. Next slide.

This presentation is going to cover several aspects of sustainable recreation including the evolution of the framework itself, components, what’s in it, what’s in the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, integration of the framework in the larger Forest Service, some of the lessons learned from some forests and regions that have been testing and piloting and using the framework and then what the shift and what the change really is and what it means to the agency. Next slide.

We’re all familiar with the issues that recreation managers are facing these days, loss of connection to national forest, deferred maintenance, trail erosion and the shift from a timber-based economy to a recreation and tourism economy. The issues are not getting any easier to deal with and in fact I’ve heard some people call them wicked issues. They require us as recreation managers to develop new approaches to deal with them. Next slide.

The evolution of the framework in the idea of sustainable recreation really began when Arthur Carhart was hired in 1919. His work and his vision included the first forest-wide comprehensive recreation plan in the nation for the San Isabel National Forest in southern Colorado. This plan provided a thorough and practical framework for how the Forest Service could provide a set of solutions

to address the booming outdoor recreational needs of the public in the national forest and particularly around the community of Pueblo, Colorado. Decision and foresight is how the Forest Service can address the need for the public and what it continues to provide. It continues to provide us perspective and inspiration today for sustainable recreation. Next slide.

This vision is embodied in the [inaudible 0:03:49] tagline for the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, which is renewing body and spirit, inspiring passion for the land. This really comes directly out of that quote you see on the slide from Arthur Carhart. We believe that we can address many of the nation’s modern-day issues with this new perspective. It frames our belief and hope and expectation around the benefits that recreation provides to the American public and to the land. It’s the cornerstone for the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. Next slide please.

The vision also frames the six principles that are in the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. At first the principles are kind of simple, things that we really already think about. Sustainability, community engagement, larger landscape and integration but it really requires a shift in the way work in thinking about things from a holistic perspective and how everything is connected to each other. The goal values really emerge from over several years of people talking about what was most important. There was a meeting five or six years ago where a group of people from across the country first came together and started talking about what recreation meant to them and how we can kind of start making that shift. From that, these six core values emerged and evolved.

I’m just going to touch on a couple of them first. Connecting people with their natural and cultural heritage. It’s really one of the core cornerstones of the framework is making sure that people know about their public lands and the opportunities that they provide not just recreation, but we all know that many people first connect to public lands in the outdoors through recreation opportunities.

Promoting healthy lifestyle, that’s an interesting one because a lot of people, particularly in the Forest Service, we don’t think about health and wellbeing as part of something that we do. Yet when we look at what’s going on around us health is such a big part of it. People in communities are doing lots of different things, trails and open spaces to make sure that the communities have opportunities for healthy lifestyles. We’re a part of that because we’re connected to our communities.

I probably don’t have to say much about the interconnection with sustainability. We all know that is core to our mission in the Forest Service. This is just

reiterating that sustainability is what’s driving recreation and everything else we do.

Community engagement is essential for creation sustainable recreation. Community engagement of course is very strong in a new planning role, and one of the things that we’re going to talk about a little bit later is the shift from us being doers to the Forest Service being planners, facilitators and conveners and tapping into the energy and creativity of people and engaging them for the benefit of public lands.

Manage national forests and grasslands as part of the larger landscape. Again, this is about looking at the bigger system and what else is going on around us as public lands, open spaces, private uses as well. This really ties in with the America’s Great Outdoors initiative and other things like that where we want to look at all land and I would add with the community engagement, all hands approach.

In the integrate recreation we’re deeply into the Forest Service mission. The recreation program, it’s about contributing to sustainability not just about the recreation program itself being sustainable but contributing to that larger sustainability on the national forest and working together with other programs to figure out what that means and how we maximize that contribution. Next slide.

The framework also has ten focus areas. I’m not going to go into detail on each of these focus areas. These focus areas provide really the fundamental building blocks for establishing sustainable recreation program on a forest. The intent is for the focus areas to guide the work that the regions and forests do. Not that each region or forest is going to spend time on each of these focus areas but to pick where they have the most energy and the most leverage and to spend time on perhaps focusing on one or two of the focus areas. For example, Region 4 recently has been working on a draft recreation strategy and the workforce as well as special places as some of the focus areas they’re going to spend some time on. Next slide.

How do you take the vision, the principles and the focus areas and apply them at the local level to your region, your forest and your community? Really, sustainable recreation in some ways is part of what we’re already doing. The framework provides that guidance as a framework does of kind of what we can hang our hats on. As I mentioned, Region 4 has been taking some action as well as may other regions. Region 9, for example, is focusing on community engagement and has developed an engagement model for sustainability in using recreation and tourism as kind of that catalyst to begin those discussions, that

dialogue about sustainability; I’m going to use the word region in the little r sense.

For example the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois has been working with communities in and around southern Illinois to develop a common vision and goals for the forest and other outdoor recreation and tourism providers to work towards. What Region 9 is calling it is Community Engagement Through Recreation and Tourism or CERT, because we all have to have an acronym of course. Region 3 is currently working on a regional recreational strategy that will provide guidance to the forest in that region and Region 10, while they haven’t done a specific strategy for the region, they are also encouraging the two forests, Chugach and the Tongass, to work with individual communities around the forest to come up with common vision and goals for recreation and tourism in several communities, [Rengal 0:10:38], Sitka, Yakutat and now there is some work going on in the Chugach area have been doing that.

The new planning rule actually does define sustainable recreation and that definition is the set of recreations the settings and opportunities on the National Forest System that is ecologically, economically and socially sustainable for present and future generations. Many aspects of the planning rule overlap with the principles of sustainable recreation. The all lands, all hands approach, community engagement, connecting people to nature. Having the framework helps shape and strengthen sustainable recreation in the planning rule. They will kind of work on at the same time and the folks in the WO certainly used what was in the framework to help shape what went into the planning rule.

Another aspect of integration, integrating the framework into the Forest Service is around using volunteers. Using volunteers and getting people out into the forest is really what’s going to help us be relevant to the future generations. It’s critical to the success of the whole agency and there’s an opportunity to take what the framework goes out to and figure out how it integrates with being relevant to you. There are several forests, one that comes to mind the Coronado National Forest is working with their communities, the school district other public lands and has developed the Sky Island Children’s Forest. The goal is to make the public lands relevant to the youth. There is a new national youth strategy, volunteer services strategy and that connection is really strong.

Another, kind of final, aspect of integration is climate change. Obviously it’s a big deal and the Forest Service is really … We’re trying to figure out what that means to us and how we manage our national forests in the face of huge impacts of climate change. Recreation is obviously connected to that. One of the obvious connections is ski areas and how the use of ski areas is going to change in the winter if we’re not going to have as much snow or even more snow in some cases. We have an opportunity to model who to operate our site in a

sustainable way through greener operations. Recreation is a portal to connect with the public. If recreation isn’t relevant then other areas of the agency won’t be relevant either. Next Slide.

As I mentioned, there are several regions that have been kind of framing how they’re going to approach sustainable recreation as well as individual forests have been developing recreation strategies, engaging with their communities. Several forests are looking at their recreation sites and figuring out, because that’s their biggest cost centers, figuring out how to make those more sustainable. These lessons learned come from those forests that have been exploring sustainable recreation over the last couple of years.

One thing I wanted to note is that sustainable recreation is not really a process or a model. There is not a right or wrong way to do it. These lessons are really just some of the ah-hah moments that forests have had. There are some similarities in those. There is a draft framework implementation guide that’s been floating around out there for the last year or so and several forests have been kind of using that, refining, testing and that will eventually be kind of put out there so that others can use it as well.

Most forests want to know where they stand before going out to the public. Most often this has been looking at costs of recreation site and trail infrastructure, operation and maintenance costs because that is typically where most of the money is going to. Some forests have also done a situation assessment to understand how recreation is or is not contributing to sustainability and where they have the most leverage to move. I mentioned the Coronado. They decided youth was their leverage so they started the Sky Island Children’s Forest. Another example would be the Prescott National Forest where they had some very involved communities in and around the Prescott and Camp Verde and all those communities down there and they’ve been working with those communities developing trail plans, coming up with common goals and things that they can all work on together.

However, while it’s good to understand the current situation, there is also a tendency to get stuck in that analysis, paralysis. It’s important to start working with stakeholders and partners early and often. Several forests have started smaller community engagement often by talking with other outdoor recreation providers and then expanded the we as a common vision and forum. This was not typical public engagement around the [inaudible 0:15:58] project. Rather it’s about dialogue to understand different perspectives and to work towards common goals. It does take the dialogue and the talking, which can take time and for example I’ll go back to the Shawnee as well. They started working on this in 2009. It’s been almost four years and they’re still working with

communities and they’ve built great relationships but they found that it took a lot of time to get there.

People often ask about what the process is for sustainable recreation. As I said, there’s not really a process or a cookbook. It really depends on what you want to do. You need to engage where you’re at. Some forests have very engaged communities and have been working closely with them to identify recreation needs and opportunities and other forests are just beginning to work and to step into that world. One of the first things you need to do is to identify the scope and scale and with others define what sustainable recreation means. Next slide.

I’m not seeing it yet, but maybe it’s coming up. I’ll go ahead and get started. This is probably obvious but sustainability is an anchor for implementing the Framework for Sustainable Recreation. By that I mean that all three tiers, social, ecological and economic must be given consideration and work together. Often in the Forest Service and in other land management agencies we focus on the ecological side of things and don’t spend as much time on the social and economic, but it really takes all three tiers to get to the sweet spot of sustainability. Another less is to look through the lens of possibility. Often we get disheartened by the lack of funding and staff and we feel like we can’t do anything new, but when we look through the lens of possibility and we’re open to new ideas many opportunities appear that we haven’t thought of before.

The point is not that we do everything for everybody but that we explore what can be done together. One of the key lessons is that once you start talking about sustainability it quickly gets bigger than recreation. We start with recreation because it is the portal through which most people connect to their public lands, however, sustainable recreation is truly about recreations contribution and influence on sustainability at the forest and community level. Integration at those scales is critical. It’s important to start where you can and use that leverage but to think about how it all connects to each other.

In initial conversations, many forests have pushed back on the idea that agency has a role in physical health. I mentioned this kind of at the beginning with the principles. There is so much evidence that having access to open space and public lands significantly increases people’s health. The Shawnee again is a good example, and they’ve been working with their healthcare community in southern Illinois and doctors are even now starting to write prescriptions to get out into nature, nature prescriptions.

I’m not going to go into green operations very much, but we all know it’s more than about recycling. You’re going to hear from Jessica about the sustainable recreation design guide and how those principles can be brought in from the very beginning into the design of recreation sites. It encompasses much more

than recycling, and it’s about getting people involved into sustainability discussions. Next slide.

What is the change? What’s the shift we’re really talking about? Like I said there’s not a recipe for sustainable recreation. It’s about looking at our work and seeing how we can contribute. Many forests are doing great things and working with partners and engaging communities. [Inaudible 0:19:56] the framework is that shift in perspective. No matter the size or the scope of the project the “we” or working with the partners is a driver for the work that we’re doing using this all lands, all hands approach. Our role changes from being a doer to being a catalyst, a convener and a participant. While sustainability is our mission, it really is that container and the lens through which all of our work is done.

It’s about more than protecting the environment. It encompasses all three spheres holistically. Once we in recreation recognize the power of doing our work through the lens of sustainability we also recognize that our role in delivering the agencies mission is different. Without sustainable recreation, there is not a sustainable Forest Service. With that we can begin to understand that learning and adapting are the only ways to be successful as an agency. Next slide.

With the introduction of the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, it’s been out for a couple of years now. It came out in 2011. Again, it’s part of being that learning organization and figuring out what that shift and that change means. It’s an ongoing process in evaluating, adapting and making adjustments as need be.

That’s just a quick overview about what the Framework for Sustainable Recreation is about. Again, Jessica is going to go into some kind of putting that into practice with the sustainable recreation design guide. With that, I will end my presentation. Thank you.

Katie: Thanks so much Rachel. That was really informative. We have a couple of minutes for one or two questions if you have any questions for Rachel. You can type it into the notes on the webinar or presents *1 on your phone. Emily, I’ll just wait and hear if anyone has any questions from you.

Emily: I am not seeing any just yet.

Katie: Are you able to stick around for the rest of the presentation in case people have questions later?

Rachel: Yes, I am.

Katie: Okay. Great. Thanks so much. All right it sounds like there aren’t any questions at this time. We’ll move on to our next speaker. I’m happy to introduce Jessica Dunn, a landscape architect in Region 3 and she’ll be talking about the Sustainable Recreation Design Guide. Jessica, whenever you’re ready.

Jessica: Okay. Thanks Katie. This is Jessica. I hope everyone can hear me okay. I’m a landscape architect here in Region 3 and the southwestern region, and basically I’m a regional resource. I work on projects throughout our region based on a need for landscape architecture services for both design and planning projects. Next slide.

I’m excited today to talk about the SRDG, which is the Forest Service’s Sustainable Recreation Design Guide. As Rachel mentioned, we love our acronyms. We think we got a pretty good one, and we’ve been working on this project, spearheaded out of Region 3 since 2012. It’s a really exciting, cutting edge project that intended to link a lot of the theory of many of our agency mission and directive into practice in the field. Today I’ll just be giving a background, a brief overview of our project’s progress to date, what our vision is, our objectives, goals and content. Next.

The SRDG is really inspired by the Framework for Sustainable Recreation, which Rachel did a great job of describing. This new strategy for management of forests lands identifies that we’re at a critical turning point as an agency with our shrinking budgets, increasing visitor demands for quality recreation and integrated recreation settings. Because of this increased demand we can really no longer manage as we have in the past. One of the questions we had was how to relate the framework to the field since sustainability does underlie all of our program decisions.

Also, we’ve been really inspired by the forest service implementation guide for the framework and we’ve really worked a lot with Rachel and tied in with the team that’s developing the implementation guide and we sort of talked about what role the SRDG would fill in companionship with the implementation guide and we really feel like the implementation guide is focused on the big picture of forest service management, developing partnerships, protecting heritage resources, developing a sustainable financial foundation, but there still is not yet that instruction for field level folks available. That’s the role that SRDG is hopefully going to fill.

In addition, we have the new planning role and new directives coming out that really focus on sustainable recreation and ecosystem services and the importance of these, also scenic character, recreation opportunities. Those are

all [inaudible 0:25:10] directives. FS2300 is being updated to reflect our focus on sustainability.

Additionally, we have a lot of work being done in the private sector and in the larger design and planning world at large. Many efforts have been undertaken to incorporate sustainability into project design and implementation and green design and sustainable methods are now really every day best practices. We have lead, the leadership and energy and environmental design rating system. We have the guidance of federal agencies and sustainable practices for design landscapes which actually came out of the federal government for federal facilities, and we also have the sustainable sites initiative, which is basically the landscape architecture take on the lead system. It basically allows you to walk through a series of performance benchmarks and ratings to give a project a green rating.

One of the things we did when we first started the SRDG was we tried to walk a Forest Service recreation site project through the sustainable sites initiative outlined rating system and it couldn’t even rate out because a lot of the benchmarks and the initial performance requirements we weren’t even able to meet. For example, we don’t really use irrigation on a lot of our sites. A lot of our sites are remote so we couldn’t tap into multimodal transportation, these sorts of things. That kind of really showed us we needed something specific for what we do in our unique national forest management. Next slide.

Since 2012 we submitted a proposal to the Technology and Development Center and it was picked up. We’ve been working in tandem with them on this project. We’ve also been supported by the Washington office and partnered with multiple internal organizations such as sustainable ops, which has been a really great supporter in helping us pick up detailers to assist with the project. We’ve assembled a team of Las and engineers nationwide to help with the creation of the document.

We have a core team and we have a group of consultants. It’s really a nationwide effort. SRDG really allows us to develop a sustainable design guide that shows our commitment to sustainability in the agency. It’s a cutting edge project. It’s timely. It allows us to be proactive instead of reactive by integrating sustainability methods up front and it also puts us on par with other government agencies and private industry advances in the field of sustainability, which are all shown on the slide there, the sustainable sites which I mentioned and lead and the National Park Service has also done a lot of great work in this field of sustainability.

Also, more importantly, the SRDG allows us to fulfill our mission, which is outlined in our new planning role and directive helping us to ensure that our

recreation settings and opportunities are ecologically, environmentally and socially sustainable for present and future generations. It puts us in the mix of other progressive action oriented work that’s happening worldwide in sustainability and it exhibits to our public our commitment to our mission and to sustainability. Rec sites and settings are often the first and only interaction the public has with our agency. We have this potential to foster stewardship through ecorevolutory design and raising awareness about sustainable methods and design.

The SRDG provides us the opportunity to become leaders and champions and sustainability in the Forest Service. Next slide.

What is the SRDG? Since the pickup of the project by the Technology and Development Center we really worked on articulating a clear vision for our project. We held a great visioning session in September 2012 in Phoenix, Arizona and we actually had face-to-face interaction at this visioning workshop, which was great. We had our consultants come in. We had people from the Washington office, a couple of different regional offices as well as field going landscape architects and engineers and some private sector consultants come in and we spent a day talking about this project and where it should go. We really identified a clear vision and a clear direction after that meeting.

The SRDG will be a national guidebook of best practices and processes for implementing sustainable recreational design. It will not be a prescriptive document but instead a set of guiding principles, a collection of expectations, questions and broad approaches that can help designers incorporate sustainability into recreation planning and design projects. We really feel like keeping it as a set of guiding principles is integral to keeping the document’s integrity and allowing for constant updates in sustainability advancements. With the SRDG we really want to focus on sustainable outcomes instead of more dogmatic prescriptive guidance in order to foster innovation and progress. It will really be a fluid, constantly moving document. Next slide.

The goals of the SRDG, the main goal of this project is to produce a resource for field level recreation designers and planners. Your landscape architects, your engineers, your recreation staff, field-going folk. It’s tailored to the unique assessment and management needs of our National Forest landscape, i.e., what’s sustainable in the city is not necessarily so in the forest. A lot of times we have remote locations that automatically makes our product inputs and outputs expensive and environmentally consumptive and complicated. How can we develop a guidebook that addresses these issues that are unique to us?

Additionally, the resulting guidebook will provide the necessary metrics to apply the principles of the Framework for Sustainable Recreation and specifically three

of the focus areas when constructing new or rehabilitating existing Forest Service rec developments and sites. The three main focus areas that we’re working underneath are restore and adapt recreation settings, invest in social places and implement green operations. As I mentioned, we’re really interested in connecting the ideas and theories that are outlined in the framework into the practice of every day. Next slide.

Our objectives with the SRDG are to provide field-level guidance for incorporating sustainability practices into our rec planning and design processes. This guidance document could be a companion document to the Forest Service BEIG, Built Environment Image Guide, and references many existing Forest Service efforts and assisting direction to date. It will align our best available sustainability science to the uniqueness of our outdoor recreation management and settings and really promote that the best design is sustainable design in our day and age. Next.

A key factor in our project development has been identifying our audience. The audience for the SRDG includes field-level designers landscape architects, engineers, project managers, recreation staff and recreation planners. This guidebook will be designed for project level planning and design at the ranger district and forest supervisor office levels. It’s not really tailored for a regional office project level planning, but it can be used as a general value and a general reference for all other levels of Forest Service staff. It’s really tailored for on-the-ground projects. Next.

In looking out how to structure the document of the SRDG, we put together sort of a very simple side outline that you see here to show how the guidebook will address sustainability factors at each major step of the design and planning process. Looking at sort of the process you would follow as you go through designing a campground or designing a [inaudible 0:33:04] site you have your initial planning [inaudible 0:33:08] stage when you develop a design narrative and an engineering report. Then you move into design, then you move into construction and implementation in the case of the [inaudible 0:33:17] or rehabilitation projects. That obviously would be more on the implementation side, then operation maintenance, post-construction monitoring and end of life cycle decommissioning.

The idea is to ask sustainable questions and include sustainable guidance for reach step of the planning and design process. Each of these bullets that you see here. The guidebook will provide questions and principles regarding sustainability inserted into the appropriate steps of the design and planning process and will provide an agency foundation for sustainable best practices and recreation overall. Next slide.

Just to give you an idea of our timeline. I’m sorry it’s a little small on the screen. Hopefully it’s showing up a little larger. What we’ve done to date and where we are, we have completed our articulation of the project vision and developed a cohesive project proposal and chapter outline. Now, we’re in a stage of performing a comprehensive literature review to identify applicable knowledge, information and information gaps. We’ve swooped out a number of articles, books, reports, best available science and currently our core team is going through all of that and deciding what’s relevant, where we have gaps, where more research is needed.

Then, we’ll move into using, well we sort of are still, using a collaborative, interdisciplinary, information sharing process to collect best available knowledge and agency case studies. Right now we’re working on trying to find good case studies as well as pilot projects. The difference being case studies being projects that we can use while we’re developing the SRDG to really point out where different principles that are outlined in the SRDG are being used in that particular project and pilot projects being the [inaudible 0:35:08] projects down the line that we can just the run from start to finish we can use SRDG for the entire design and planning process through a pilot project.

Starting, hopefully later this year and going into fiscal year 2015 we’ll be generating content and writing chapters. Simultaneously we’ll be reviewing, testing and editing the content. This is really where San Dimas Technology and Development Center is going to come in and help the core team with the writing and the reviewing as well as the final formatting and publishing and distributing the document. Our goal is to start that final formatting and publishing and hopefully get into distribution by mid fiscal year 2015.

Then, of course with every agency document we will move into a publicizing and implementation stage, doing presentations at national conferences, developing white papers and particularly focusing on training. How to make this guidebook part of everyday practice, how to really help incorporate it into existing suite of tools that they’re already using and design and planning projects. Next.

I guess that completes my presentation. Again, this is a broad overview of what we’re doing on the SRDG, but I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about the project.

Katie: Thanks so much Jessica. As a reminder, if you have any questions press *1 on your phone or you can type it into the webinar under the notes.

Emily: Not seeing any questions, yet.

Katie: Okay. We’ve got a quiet group today. I don’t see any on the notes either. Jessica, are you able to stick around until the end in case people have questions for you?

Jessica: Yes.

Katie: Okay. Great, thanks so much. With that, we’ll move to our next speaker. We’re going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the water-estimating tool. Sarah Baker, an environmental management systems program manager in Region 3 will be talking about this. Whenever you’re ready Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you Katie. This is great. Before I start I’d like to say something about the SRDG and about the framework. I’m really, really excited to be working with Recreation on this. Jessica and I are working together on the SRDG, and I think that as an engineer for the Forest Service for the past 20 something years I’ve realized that we are so busy at the field that we don’t all have time to consider all the possibilities of what we could be doing better, and I think that’s where the SRDG is going to come in. I’m very excited about that.

What I’m actually here to talk about today though is our water estimating tool. It’s something that started out with looking at water use in buildings, but it could also be applied to recreation. For those who are here today because of the recreation point of view, I want to share the recreation possibilities with you too. If you can go to the next slide for me Katie.

What are we talking about? This tool is, as a friend of mine says, is not rocket surgery. It’s something basic that we’ve put together in an attempt to start understanding our water footprint for the agency. It’s a simple spreadsheet when you look at the tool itself. It’s designed to work with Infra, our database, so that we can pull information out of Infra, plug it into the tool and spit out what we hope will be a water footprint for the systems that we don’t have any way of measuring water use on. That’s what we’re doing.

It’s based on FEMP, which is the Federal Energy Management Program, on their water estimating techniques. It’s based on a real average number. We have some ways to finesse that, and I’ll share all that with you in a very quick manner so that you understand what’s available. Then you can let me know I guess if you want a copy of it, but you can also be aware of what’s coming out. We’ll be looking at trying to do something with this nationally to help people understand what their footprint is. If you go to the next slide please.

What does this do? What we’re trying to do is estimate the water use in a building or at a site based on the type of building or the type of site, the number of people that use it and the number of days that the water is used. It’s pretty

basic information. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s pretty basic. That’s all we’re trying to do with this tool. Next slide please.

I want to give you an idea of what the information we’re basing it on is. These are values from the FEMP web site, which is actually taken from the American Waterworks Association, 1996 estimating quantities. What it is, is that each type of building or type of site has an estimate for how much water we use. These factors, as I said came from 1996. One thing you have to be aware of is that water use changes as our habits change in society. We want to use the newest numbers we have, but these really are the ones that are the widest ranging for different types of buildings, different types of sites we have a use.

For example, the first one, in an airport the average passenger uses three gallons per water per day. Each day that somebody is there you’d estimate three gallons of water use. Pretty basic simple stuff. I want you to be aware that also we have our own water-estimating gauge here in the Forest Service Handbook 740911. In section 4411, exhibit 1, we have some estimates for water use that are based on, some of them, things that we’ve measured in the Forest Service. They’re very specific. It’d be things like campgrounds, day-use areas, different types of dwellings that we generally have and other miscellaneous sites. Some of these coordinate really well with FEMP and others don’t. Others are more specific.

When you’re looking at this tool for recreation, specifically, I would really look closer at adding in the factors from our handbooks. Just wanted to throw that in as information. Next slide please.

How does this help? One of the things you may or may not be aware of is we’re looking at trying to reduce our water use. We report our water use based on what we pay for. In the Forest Service we have a lot of sites where we produce the water. Those sites are not necessarily metered or if they are nobody is actually reading the meter. We have quite a bit of water that we’re not reporting when we start talking about the quantity of water the agency uses. What we’re trying to do here is estimate the water use for those places. The good thing about this is it gives us an opportunity to know what we’re doing as a baseline or at least to start estimating what we’re doing in order to be more efficient. How can you tell if you’re being more efficient in a building if you don’t know how much water you’re using.

Once we use the estimating tool to come up with an estimate of how much water we’re using we can then compare that to what we actually use. Let me show you what it looks like on the next slide. This output is pretty basic. I’ve had to take a long line off a spreadsheet and chop it into pieces so you can see what the columns are, but this is designed to pull data out of Infra and then dump it

into this spreadsheet. The data that comes out of Infra is not all shown here. It’s a little bit in bits and pieces. Unfortunately, we can’t get all of it in one place in Infra, but if we could put all this in, fill all this information in we would get at the bottom our regional water use, or site water use or whatever you want to use it for, for the year. That’s the idea. Next slide please.

Here’s our problem. Those of you who work with Infra probably are very well aware of this. First of all, we can’t get all the required information for this tool from one table in Infra. For example, we have a water table where we have the systems that we own and how many days they’re operated and what the status is. Then, we have the buildings table where we have information on the number of employees that are in the offices. The pieces of information that are missing are things like the number of people who use our bunkhouses or the number of people who work in a warehouse all day. We don’t have those. Those are some of the missing pieces of data for this tool.

In rec sites we do have a lot of really good information on the number of people who use the rec sites. You can go through and use that number and go through the calculations of here’s the high season, low season averages, put those numbers in and then estimate how much water is used at that site. Next slide please.

Let me give you an example. This is one system. This is the background spreadsheet that spits into the one we already saw. For the Sandia District office, as you see below the line in the top part of this, there is one water system that feeds all of these buildings. If we look at the buildings, the only one we actually have numbers on, and it’s number of employees, is the office and unfortunately of course it was put in several years ago and may or may not be accurate, but that’s where we have the numbers.

If you go to the next slide, we take that information roll it up and put it into one line of that final spreadsheet. You’ll see the Sandia District, their water system which is either operating for 365 days a year or 261 depending on which part of the database you use and has 45 employees, then it’s estimated to use 176,000 gallons of water per year. Next slide.

Why do we care about this? Really good question. Last year we reported that we purchased 26 million gallons of water in the agency. In Region 3 where I’m a little bit more familiar with the water systems, just using the data we have, which is not by any means all of it, we’re estimating somewhere around four million gallons more that we use that we don’t report on. When we start looking at how much water we’re using and how much we want to reduce, we’re not looking at the whole amount. I’m thinking at this point from the data I’ve seen, especially in Region 3, we have less than half of the system with numbers of

personnel and we have no outdoor water reported on here yet, because it’s something that’s not in our database.

We could be looking at 20% of our water use is going unreported and uninvestigated. Next slide. That’s not the only reason that we care. We really want to be able to highlight the issues and the places where we want to work first to reduce our water use and one of the things that really always resonates with me is that we’re estimating in this country that 14% of the indoor water use is attribute to leaks. If you don’t know if your system is leaking you won’t know to fix it. One of the ways we can tell if it’s leaking is to use the estimate for the water use and if we have a system that is metered, look at the meter and compare the two. We could use this tool even for those where we pay for water and have a quantity to see if it’s really in the ballpark of where it should be.

One of the other things I think is really interesting, a lot of people tend to be more concerned about energy use than water use and part of that is because our water is so cheap in this country right now. If you realize that in a municipality 35% of the energy a municipality uses is used for water and wastewater treatment systems. By reducing our water use we could be reducing our energy use and therefore our greenhouse gas emissions quite a bit. Next slide please.

I just want to leave you with my contact information. If you have questions or thoughts or something you’d like to know about the water estimating tool and you don’t think about it today, please e-mail me. It’s a very simple method of estimating our water use, but it’s something that you can use for yourself. For your forest, for your district, for your building. It’s also something we’re going to be trying to use on a more national level to look at our overall use, but that’s something we’ll be working on for the next couple of years. Are there any questions?

Emily: Sorry Katie.

Katie: Go ahead.

Emily: I was just going to say once again if you’d like to ask a question you can dial *1 or send a note to presenters.

Katie: While we’re waiting for people to call in with their questions, there is actually one note that I’ll read aloud for you Sarah. It says the climate change impact is currently estimated … I think this is partially based on what Rachel said and then it’s a question about the water-estimating tool. The climate change impact is currently estimated to reduce the snow season at Lake Tahoe from five months to one by the end of the century. If ski areas attempt to pump more groundwater to make more snow, which may be rained off during former snow

months, the probability of effectively mining the groundwater resources looms as a possibility that would dry up the forests and their streams beginning the unraveling of the bionet. Please comment on how well the water estimation tool might address these situations. I know it’s not exactly, but I thought you might have some good comments for that.

Sarah: I’m happy to comment on that. I think maybe Rachel will want to also.

Katie: Okay.

Sarah: The water-estimating tool won’t really help us resist that urge to mine the groundwater, but it would help us figure out how much we’re using in some places where we may be mining the groundwater without realizing it. I think that’s part of the key here is that we’re talking about our own internal operations. It could also be used for our partners and for those who have special use agreements with us when they’re estimating their water use. Ski areas I realize is a very special thing not included in the FEMP tool I must admit. I think that’s really part of sustainability, what we’re talking about here is looking at how we use all of our resources and finding the thing that really works the best for everyone and for environment. That’s the key. It’s a really good comment I think.

Emily: Rachel, would you like to say something?

Rachel: I’m not sure I could respond to that. I’m certainly not a climate change expert. I think it is a really good comment and something that should be brought up in particular to the folks who are climate change experts to see what their take is on that.

Katie: Thank you both. I’m not seeing any other questions over notes. Emily, are there any over the phone.

Emily: No questions.

Katie: Okay.

Emily: We’ve got a very quick group here. They’re very quiet. I love it.

Katie: I know, very quiet. I’ll just highlight the next peer learning webinar. The date is wrong on the screen, I apologize. It’s July 3rd, Wednesday, July 3rd at 10:00 a.m. Pacific, and we’ll be talking about the NetZero guides and the pilot studies they completed this year as well as hearing about what the [inaudible 0:51:27] team is working on. The link on the right side of the page is the peer-learning schedule

for the rest of SY13. Just one more call for questions. Press *1 on your phone If you have any questions for any of our speakers.

Emily: It looks like we do have one.

Speaker 1: Am I connected?

Emily: You are.

Speaker 1: Okay. Hi. This is Joey [inaudible 0:51:55]. I was just going to ask if the old estimates that have been out there for water usage are just out of date. We’ve continued over the years to use I think 250 gallons a day for a family of four, and I think that came out of the old Public Health Service Guidelines that EPA adopted. Are those just out of date now or what would you recommend?

Sarah: I believe those have been updated. I know we used that number for quite a long time. I think they’re getting more specific now to the number of people actually in the family and coming up with an estimate based on more recent measurements, but still recent is relative. The numbers we’re using right now from 1996, that’s still quite a while ago unfortunately.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Sarah: I’m trying to keep my eyes open and look for the newest numbers coming out, but they are sort of coming out as a hit or miss thing and they’re also being looked at regionally, which I think is not a bad thing. I know that we use different amounts of water in the west than our cohorts in the east do. I think it’s something we may want to break up into regions eventually if we can get good data.

Speaker 1: I didn’t catch the number that was on the table quick enough. I was just kind of skimming through seeing what they were, but is there one for an individual in a home on the forest and roughly how much is that these days? How many gallons is it?

Sarah: That’s a really good question. The funny thing about this is that FEMP didn’t come up with that number. I had to go find it other sources, and what I found was I found the EPA’s number which they’re using now as 70 gallons per person per day.

Speaker 1: That’s pretty close. If you take four times 70 you’d get 280. That’s pretty close.

Sarah: It’s pretty close, and you figure it’d probably be less than that for four because really if you start looking at clothes washing and those major water use things it would not be the same amount multiplied by the number of people.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I was just curious if it was really a big change, and it sounds like maybe this water saving device might shift it a little. Okay. Okay thank you.

Sarah: You bet.

Emily: I am not seeing any further questions.

Katie: Okay thanks. I don’t see any on the notes either. So thanks so much to our speakers. You guys gave great talks today, and thanks everyone for listening in. If any of your colleagues would like to tune in this webinar was recorded and will be available on the Sustainable Operations Collector SharePoint site. Thanks again to the speakers, and everybody have a good day.

Sarah: Thank you Katie, and thank you Emily. We appreciate the help.

Emily: You’re welcome.