Cacapon Watershed Collaborative
The Cacapon Watershed Collaborative (CWC) aims to protect the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Watershed’s valuable ecosystems and residents’ way of life. The Cacapon Watershed Conservation Plan outlines the key strategies to achieve that mission.
The CWC mission is to harness each partners organization’s skills, experience, and resources to preserve the Cacapon Watershed’s streams, forests, and farms so human and wildlife communities can thrive.
Our vision is an interconnected network of protected and well-managed lands that ensures the Cacapon Watershed’s ecological resilience, economic vitality, and the health of its people.
Located in the Central Appalachian Mountains, the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Watershed of eastern West Virginia is nationally recognized as one of the most ecologically beneficial tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay. Functional, largely intact natural ecosystems still characterize much of the region. Its forests, which cover about 80% of the watershed, constitute the great “lungs” of the East, providing oxygen, regulating the water cycle, sequestering greenhouse gases, and moderating climate. These aspects, along with north-south-oriented ridges and valleys, provide important habitat for rare and threatened species, a critical migratory corridor, and high levels of resiliency against a warming climate. These natural resources provide abundant clean air and clean water to protect the health of local and regional communities, along with robust economic opportunities.
Yet, situated less than two hours from Washington DC, and adjacent to some of the nation’s fastest-growing areas, the watershed faces significant threats, particularly from unplanned and unsustainable development. Indeed, the pace of land conversion proceeds unabated. Meanwhile, local landowners—many of them small family farmers—face numerous challenges to their way of life as they struggle to hold onto their land while market pressures mount and succession concerns loom. Ultimately, this means that tracts of land with intact ecosystems and significant conservation values face imminent risk of degradation, subdivision and fragmentation.
The fact that about 85 percent of land in the watershed is privately owned, underscores the need to support landowners to hold onto and protect their land. Therefore, the CWC prioritizes strategies that emphasize landowner collaboration.
The Cacapon Watershed Collaborative consists of a diverse group of more than a dozen non-profit watershed groups, land trusts, state and local government agencies, educational institutions, and landowners, including the Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust (CLRLT), Friends of the Cacapon River (FCR), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Trout Unlimited (TU), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), The Conservation Fund, the Cacapon Institute, county Farm Protection Bureaus, WV Department of Environmental Protection, WV Division of Forestry, WV Division of Natural Resources, and West Virginia University-Extension, along with individual landowners and farmers.
The CWC is dedicated to harnessing each partner organization’s skills, experience, and resources to preserve the Cacapon Watershed’s streams, forests, and farms so human and wildlife communities can thrive.
An example of this collaboration in action is the Cacapon Watershed Conservation Plan that is the product of more than a year of thoughtful research, input, and robust debate. The CWC is committed to maintaining the plan as a “living document” to ensure it keeps informing ongoing, evidence-based, adaptive management. Regularly updating and iteratively improving the plan is a key obligation
The collaborative holds quarterly Pause-and-Reflect meetings to review progress, adaptively update the watershed plan, and set interim goals for the next quarter. Decisions are made by consensus during facilitated planning meetings, or in smaller working groups, depending on the task at hand. Technical working groups meet regularly as needed. For example, four working groups were formed to complete a comprehensive viability analysis to gauge the current health of the watershed’s forests, farms, streams, and keystone species, and to identify metrics and data sources to track progress on improving their health. These working groups now implement the five prioritized strategies of the plan using the work and monitoring plans they developed to track ongoing progress on implementation and results.
We ensure our work remains community grounded through the participation of a diverse set of local organizations involved in various aspects of protecting the land, natural resources, and rural heritage of this valuable watershed, as well as individual landowners and farmers
Individual CWC partner organizations provide financial resources, technical assistance, training, and education to communities and landowners, many of whom have inherited family farms and surrounding forests but lack the resources to sustain them. The CWC envisions this broad-based collaboration will bolster the efforts of these organizations, streamline processes and resource-sharing, attract additional resources, and build the capacity needed to tackle increasingly complex environmental and social challenges.
Safeguarding the health and resiliency of the watershed requires thoughtful, evidence-based strategic planning, followed by implementation informed by systematic monitoring and smart adaptation to keep pace with complex and rapidly changing realities. The Cacapon Watershed Conservation Plan represents the collective expertise, experience, and thought of the individual partners. Four active working groups are implementing and monitoring the plan.
