International watershed seminar fosters cooperation
July 5, 2005
Fifteen watershed managers from around the world gathered in Wisconsin in June for the fourth annual International Seminar on Watershed Management, a 17-day field-based workshop designed to give participants tools they need to plan for the sustainable use of resources in their communities.
The seminar was sponsored by the USDA Forest Service Office of International Programs and conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Global Environmental Management Education Center (GEM).
“Each year the program is getting stronger and stronger,” said Wes Halverson, GEM Watersheds Program Manager.
This year’s class included mid- and senior-level managers from 14 different countries: China, Uganda, Turkey, Panama, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, Peru, Guatemala, Mongolia and Jordan.
The seminar featured more than a dozen site visits, ranging from the Milwaukee River Watershed Restoration Project and a discussion of groundwater depletion issues, to Bayfield for a look at ecotourism and to Onalaska for a meeting with Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources professionals working on the Upper Mississippi Watershed Management Initiative.
This year, for the first time, participants took an online course before arriving in Wisconsin, which gave them a head start on understanding the issues and gave students and faculty a chance to learn a little about each other before they met.
“Each year the program is getting stronger and stronger,” said Wes Halverson, GEM Watersheds Program Manager. “The surprising thing is, we learn as much from the participants as they learn from us.”
That’s because the program includes ample time for discussion and requires each participant to make a presentation to the group about his or her home watershed.
Seminar themes included providing a global perspective of watershed management strategies; seeing watersheds as “nature’s boundaries” where land and water resources are connected; management based on sound science; and partnership and stakeholder involvement.
Wisconsin is ideally suited to host this event, according to Victor Phillips, GEM Director. “We have 34,000 miles of rivers and 15,000 lakes within the state, and hundreds of miles of shoreline on two of the world’s Great Lakes, the Mississippi River on our western border, plus our buried treasure, our groundwater resources,” Phillips said.
Since the program’s inception in 2002, 74 people from 30 countries have attended the seminars here in Wisconsin, sharing their knowledge and taking home new ideas. Ongoing partnerships have been forged with several of those participants. Three GEM Student Ambassadors from UWSP, for example, are currently working on a pilot project in the Kat River region of South Africa.
