US Forests provide 83 million people with half their water - Threat Center science highlighted by American Geophysical Union
A broad new study of surface water sources for more than 5,000 public water systems shows that 125 million people, or about 38% of the country’s population, receive at least 10% of their water from forests. In the arid western U.S., 39.5 million people get more than half of their surface drinking water from forests that are increasingly under threat of wildfires.
The new study, published in the AGU journal Water Resources Research, updates our understanding of where our surface water comes from. Threat Center scientists and colleagues developed a new database of inter-basin water transfers, which move surface water from where it’s plentiful to where it’s not. The researchers found, for example, that 69% of the water transported to Los Angeles, and 82% of Phoenix’s imported water, originated on forested lands.
“Healthy forests typically mean clean water, and people depend on forests for their surface drinking water supplies,” said Peter Caldwell, a hydrologist at the U.S Forest Service and co-author of the new study. “Until we completed this work, we just did not know how many people obtain their water from forested lands or how much water from forests they receive.”
Read the full USFS / AGU news release here.
Read the original research article here.
