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Tongass Home » Districts and Offices » Prince of Wales Island » Projects & Plans

How do we manage Watersheds in the Tongass National Forest?

The Thorne River Resource managers need a firm understanding of relationships between land use, soils and water to manage watersheds well. They need to know where rainfall occurs, how runoff flows across the landscape and who or what uses these waters.

This image shows a stream disappearing into a sinkhole.Prince of Wales Island contains areas with limestone or carbonate bedrock. This type of bedrock results in unique watershed characteristics such as disappearing streams and underground stream systems. Water in karst watersheds generally disappears underground and is controlled largely by fractures and holes (sinkholes) in the earth. Water in more traditional watersheds flows across the land surface and is controlled by topography.

Geese feed in a marsh and loggers inspect a pile of logs as a loader works in the background.Because there are so many factors affecting a watershed, management decisions are generally made by a group of people representing many different fields.

The unique combination of traditional and karst watersheds on Prince of Wales Island provide opportunities for management practices not found elsewhere.

Forest Service employee working on a dye tracing project.

Campbell Scientific monitoring equipment measures temperature, electrical conductance, pH and stage (depth).

Did you know:

  • Dyes, which are dropped into sinkholes and other karst features, are used by hydrologists to determine underground watercourses in the karst systems. The results of these dye traces are used to determine where watershed boundaries exist.

  • Wildlife biologists use deer pellet transects to determine where deer live and how many deer populate an area within a watershed.

  • Hydrologists study the physical aspects of streams, fisheries biologists. Aquatic ecologists study the biologic or living aspects of streams.

Current Watershed Projects

USDA Forest Service - Tongass National Forest
Last Modified: July 11, 2007