Worldwide Water Education

November 21, 2012

Digital Availability of Colorado Watershed Map Coincides with Historic Binational Agreement

Just as the United States and Mexico have signed a landmark agreement for a five-year pilot initiative to restore the Colorado River's flows to lower portions of the river, Project WET is releasing a digital download version of its highly regarded Colorado Watershed Map. The detailed map shows tributaries, water management infrastructure (dams, diversions, canals, pipelines and reservoirs), cities, reservations and national parks. Water allocation, population information and color photos are also included.

With water increasingly in the news, especially in the arid Southwest United States and across the drought-stricken Great Plains, educators need tools such as the Colorado Watershed Map to help explain current events to their students. The map is just one of several Project WET materials available about the 1,450-mile Colorado River, which not only supplies some 35 million people with drinking water but is also one of North America's most valuable ecosystems. Print versions of the Colorado Watershed map are available as part of the Discover a Watershed: The Colorado educators guide (in English and Spanish) or standalone in Spanish. Children's activity booklets on the Colorado River are also available in Spanish and English.

This week's new Colorado River agreement is actually an amendment to the 1940s-era water-sharing treaty that has been in effect between the United States and Mexico since that time. The treaties that governed the complicated water-sharing relationship assigned all of the river's flows to the seven U.S. states and parts of Mexico that depend on water from the Colorado River, leaving no water for sustaining the river ecosystem. Experts say that oversight has allowed the destruction of both wetlands and the river delta. The new agreement allots about 1 percent of the river's annual flow to be returned to the delta, over the five-year span of the agreement. Scientists working in the region are "confident that meaningful restoration can be accomplished" despite the relatively small percentage alotted to sustaining the ecosystem, according to a National Geographic Water Currents article.

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