watervulnerability

Umatilla National Forest Watershed Vulnerability Assessment, Pacific Northwest Region (R6)
BACKGROUND AND FOREST CONTEXT
National Forests across the country are evaluating the risk posed by climate change to important water
resources on the forests and adjoining lands. These evaluations are focused on climate-induced hydrologic
change, impacts on water diversions and aquatic species, and interactions with infrastructure. These
Watershed Vulnerability Assessments (WVAs) provide real world examples of issue-based and
landscape-specific approaches to assessing the vulnerability of national forest watersheds and resources to
climatic changes, and planning and implementing effective adaptation.
The general intent is to display, for managers, the relative vulnerability of watersheds to climate change,
and identify watersheds containing water “values,” or systems that may be susceptible to changes in
hydrologic conditions (Hurd et al. 1999; Furniss et al. 2010). On the Umatilla National Forest (UNF),
vulnerability was considered at the following two landscape and issue scales.
1. Forestwide at the HU12 scale (162 subwatersheds have UNF ownership from