Short Course, Long Impact

  

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TWRI’s Texas Watershed Planning Short Course teaches water professionals how to develop effective watershed protection plans

More Information

• Texas Watershed Planning Program Short Course website
• Texas Watershed Planning Program honored with UCOWR Education and Public Service Award – TWRI

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A watershed protection plan can be a daunting task, both to create and implement. With many moving parts and considerations involved in creating a plan – water quality data, stakeholder involvement, regional land use, local history, population growth, agricultural needs, regulatory limitations, local cultures and traditions – not to mention implementing it, professionals new to the process may be unsure where to even start.

For 17 years, the Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI) has helped these water professionals learn to develop plans at the Texas Watershed Planning Short Course and through numerous other supporting events throughout the year.

The short course is part of TWRI’s Texas Watershed Planning Program and was conceptualized in 2006 by former TWRI Associate Director Kevin Wagner, Ph.D., who now leads the Oklahoma Water Resources Center at Oklahoma State University.

Nikki Dictson, a former TWRI specialist, and TWRI Associate Director Lucas Gregory, Ph.D., helped Wagner develop the program, with cooperation from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board, which fund the program through limited U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Nonpoint Source grants.

Creating the course

Wagner brought together a team of experts from both Texas and the United States to develop the content that became the short course.

“This was developed on the heels of EPA, who held a two-week-long watershed planning training program,” Gregory said. “It was intense, but the EPA closed that program down. So, there was a big void in training availability for watershed short courses or watershed planning in general.”

TWRI’s class was first offered in 2008, with 43 people attending the now four-day course. Since then, the course has hosted almost 400 professionals in 14 classes.

“We’ve kept the content mostly the same but have refined it over the years,” Gregory said. “We’ve taken students' feedback and trimmed some parts down, retooled things, combined presentations. We really hit the heart of what this program needs to be.”

The course works through the EPA’s defined six-step watershed planning process:

1. Build partnerships.
2. Characterize the watershed.
3. Set goals and identify solutions.
4. Design implementation programs.
5. Implement the watershed plan.
6. Measure and adjust.

Benefits of the course

“The short course itself focuses primarily on those first four steps and touches lightly on the last two,” Gregory said. “Most content that we stripped out of the short course itself is now included in standalone training programs. Those are typically day-long events essentially just focusing on that topic.”

The short course and broader watershed planning program are both focused on providing the basic tools and resources that a watershed planning professional needs to effectively develop a WPP.

Continuously evaluating and improving the course is part of what helps keep the program beneficial to those new water professionals, he said.

Bringing in professionals to share their experiences also makes the short course uniquely helpful. One of those, Tina Hendon, is now a TWRI program specialist and former EPA technical reviewer for all non-point source pollution remediation-related proposals from Texas to EPA.

“I first started giving presentations at the short course when I was at the EPA,” she said. “At that time, the agency would send several nonpoint source team members to the TWRI training to meet new water professionals and deliver presentations.”

Another benefit of the program is networking. The short course is offered in-person only, a deliberate choice made to encourage attendees to form connections.

“Most people stay and visit in the evenings and have the chance to really get to know each other,” Gregory said. “You can have those side conversations to dig deeper into specific topics or other things.”

Looking to the future

As the course nears 20 years of serving water professionals from across the United States, Gregory and Hendon work hard to keep it relevant and address emerging needs.

Educating watershed professionals new to the job is one such need. When experienced water industry professionals retire and new people are hired to fill those roles, they might lack a mentor or support system to help them learn the role and requirements. The short course meets those foundational training and mentorship needs for new water professionals.

“New professionals may not know how to actually implement a watershed planning program because they don’t have those mentors,” Hendon said. “When planning this most recent short course, we decided to add back in some of the more basic program aspects of water quality standards to provide that foundation for everybody.”

The course also adjusts its content to new guidelines from the EPA and other agencies as needed.

“We’re always adjusting, kind of reading the room, on what’s being looked at and talked about at the national level,” Gregory said. “And we integrate bits and pieces of that here in Texas.”

That hard work was recognized in 2024 when the program received the Universities Council on Water Resources’ Education and Public Service Award.

“It’s nice to be recognized as having a solid program that’s done a lot of good over the years,” Gregory said. “It has impacted watersheds beyond just Texas, since we’ve had people from other states come and participate in the course and take the knowledge back.”

The resulting watershed protection plans have the potential to improve water resources for all.

“Everybody benefits because everybody lives in a watershed,” said Mike Bira, a retired EPA nonpoint source program manager.

“So, there’s a public benefit and the wildlife benefit or nature benefit or whatever you want to call it for healthy streams and watersheds, and there is also the educational standpoint that people who understand how they live impacts water quality tend to improve their behavior, and there’s less of a negative effect on water quality.”