Kevin Wagner, OWRC, Lucas Gregory, TWRI, and Gerald J. Kauffman, UCOWR past-president.
The Texas Watershed Planning Program received the 2024 Education and Public Service Award from the Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR) during the 60th Anniversary Joint Water Resources Conference in St. Louis, Missouri earlier this month. The joint conference was hosted by UCOWR, the National Institutes for Water Resources and the American Water Resources Association.
Lucas Gregory, Ph.D., Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI) associate director, and Kevin Wagner, Ph.D., former TWRI deputy director and current Oklahoma Water Resources Center director, accepted the award.
The Texas Watershed Planning Program was developed by TWRI in 2006 with input from content experts around the U.S., including federal and state agency staff, academics, and experts in the field of watershed planning, to provide practical content to effectively teach practitioners the skills, knowledge and techniques needed to develop watershed-based plans, Gregory said.
Since its inception, the program has conducted 95 courses and counting that have trained over 3,600 practitioners in watershed planning, water quality monitoring, data analysis, watershed- based modeling, stakeholder facilitation, practice implementation and more.
This past year, the program delivered two watershed coordinator roundtables and tours, and the Introduction to Watershed Modeling, Eco-communications, Fundamentals of Water Quality Monitoring, and the new HAWQS and SELECT Model training course, to a total of 290 professionals.
The 2025 Watershed Planning Short Course will be held Jan. 27-30, 2025, in Bandera, and registration is open.
Learn more about the program at texaswpp.twri.tamu.edu.
