Saco Watershed Story Map
Source water protection is a priority of the Saco Watershed Collaborative. The Saco River provides drinking water for approximately 250,000 residents across southern Maine and New Hampshire. Forests, shoreland buffers, wetlands, aquifers, small streams, lakes and ponds, and rivers are all part of a system that collects, filters, and stores water.
Cover photo and Storymap by Xander Vitarelli, University of New England
Saco River Drinking Water Resiliency Project
SMPDC (Southern Maine Planning and Development Commission) conducted a mapping project from the estuary of the Saco River up to the Maine/New Hampshire border.
This resiliency project includes the Saco River, EGADs (Environmental and Geographic Data Analysis) on hazard risk, spatial frequency, properties in flood zones, land cover, distance buffers (a zone around a geographic feature), and more. See the FINAL REPORT.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund
LWCF was fully funded under the GAOA (Great American Outdoors Act) passed in 2020. Learn more about the places we love in this interactive map that are in the watershed, ranging from White Mountain National Forest to local parks and playgrounds.
Forests to Faucets
Developed by USDA Forest Service, this mapping tool uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to model and map the continental United States land areas most important to surface drinking water, the role forests play in protecting these areas, and the extent to which these forests are threatened by development, insects and disease, and wildland fire.
The results of this assessment provide information that can identify areas of interest for protecting surface drinking water quality. The spatial dataset can be incorporated into broad-scale planning, such as the State Forest Action Plans, and can help identify areas for further local analysis. In addition it can be incorporated into existing decision support tools that currently lack spatial data on important areas for surface drinking water.
American Farmland Trust,
Pilot Agricultural Viability Tool
Check out this pilot tool developed by American Farmland Trust (AFT) to assess the health and agriculture as an economic sector at a state, county and/or regional level.
NELF (New England Landscape Future) Mapping Tool
Developed at Harvard Forest, this mapping tool simulates how New England land use could look in 2060 using four different scenarios: connected communities, go it alone, Yankee cosmopolitan, and global. Whether exploring these scenarios at the state, county, municipality or watershed-level, users can easily access automatically generated data to compare how the different approaches to land use might affect conservation priority lands, such as wetlands and wildlife habitat, and developed lands.