RPS Goals and Benefits

Helping Restore and Protect the Nation's Waters

The primary goal of the Clean Water Act is to restore and maintain the integrity of the nation’s waters. Despite the CWA’s many pollution control successes, tens of thousands of streams, rivers and lakes have been reported as still impaired. The majority of these involve pollution sources in their watersheds – the land area that surrounds and drains into these waters.

Understanding the conditions in watersheds is crucial for restoring areas with degraded water quality as well as for protecting healthy waters from emerging problems before expensive damages occur. Achieving the CWA’s primary goal depends on having good information about watersheds, including their environmental conditions, possible pollution sources and factors that may influence restoration and protection of water quality. To support this goal, the EPA is investing in maintaining the RPS Indicator Database using scientifically sound and consistent sources. This information is made publicly and easily accessible to empower a variety of partners working toward clean and healthy waters.

Supporting Watershed Approaches

For decades, the EPA has made the watershed approach a guiding principle of its programs under the CWA and Safe Drinking Water Act. Reducing pollution from the watershed has proven to be essential to restoring polluted waters as well as keeping clean waters healthy. Historically, the information needed to use the watershed approach has been limited and watershed analysis tools were often expensive and complex. Scientific understanding of watershed effects has increased, and more and more national watershed data have now become available. The EPA invested in developing RPS data and tools and assisting users in an effort to make this knowledge base accessible, efficient and useable by anyone working to restore or protect the nation’s waters.

Providing Environmental Indicators Relevant to Water Quality

Although more and more national datasets on environmental characteristics have become available, few transform information into factors most relevant to water quality. For example, a national dataset showing the presence of agriculture may have some value in recognizing possible sources of water pollution. However, translating this data into watershed indicators, such as the percentage of agriculture on steep slopes or close to streams, is necessary to discern potential risks from non-risk situations.

RPS makes data more useful by measuring water-quality-relevant indicators on a subwatershed-by-subwatershed basis. These indicators include hundreds of ecological, stressor and social characteristics that may improve or degrade water quality or otherwise affect the prospect of successful restoration or protection projects.

Assisting Water Quality Program Priorities

Since 2004, RPS projects have taken place across many states, territories and in several special project areas (e.g., multi-state river basins) with the EPA’s assistance. Most of the EPA’s support has involved partnering with water quality programs responsible for listing and tracking impaired waters and developing Total Maximum Daily Loads. State nonpoint source pollution control programs have also used RPS Tools in statewide runoff control strategies and, in some cases, identifying healthy watersheds for protection. The EPA’s technical assistance with the RPS Tool has also helped many entities develop nutrient pollution control strategies. RPS has also played an important role in helping water programs set long-term priorities for where their greatest efforts toward restoration and protection will take place. Examples of RPS applications are available on the RPS Publications page.

Improving Local Access to Technical Watershed Information

The RPS Tool is also applicable to local scales, such as comparing HUC12 subwatersheds within a county or river basin. Local-scale efforts to restore and protect the nation’s often have the advantage of greater local community and stakeholder involvement and insights. Using the RPS Tool in local settings can be a great opportunity to include very specialized local knowledge and create user-defined indicators that can produce better results. All RPS Tools allow for selecting any user-defined subset of HUC12 subwatersheds to screen a more localized area, and local data available only for those HUC12 subwatersheds can easily be added to the hundreds of indicators already available through the RPS Tool.

Helping Partners Share Costs and Better Allocate Resources

The EPA has substantial responsibilities under the CWA and implements these by working closely with states, authorized Tribes and territories. Further, the EPA assists and partners with a wide variety of other local- to national-scale partners that include communities, local agencies, non-governmental organizations, corporations and other federal agencies involved in activities to improve or protect water quality.

Although these partners are involved in a very wide variety of activities, watershed information and some form of comparative assessment is typically a crucial part. Often, they must make hard decisions about where to invest limited efforts and funds among more problem areas than they can address. The RPS Tool helps leverage limited budgets by centrally compiling and providing subwatershed information key to watershed management decisions and actions.

Providing Customizable Tools and Data that Can Be Applied to a Wide Variety of Tasks

The RPS Tool is not a ‘one size fits all’ analytical tool. There are countless reasons and purposes for wanting to compare watersheds and make better-informed decisions. In addition, different parts of the nation have very different environments. Building in the ability of RPS users to customize their tool and their analysis was crucial. In particular, RPS users get to define their own geographic area of interest and choose the most relevant indicators. Users can weight the indicators differently if desired. What’s more, users are not limited to the RPS Indicator Database; they can add more indicators to their custom tool from outside sources. The end result is a flexible, public source of relevant data and tools that can be tailored to a wide variety of efforts to restore and protect healthy waters across the nation.