The Saco River Watershed
Created by the Education and Outreach Committee and cartographer Bill Duffy, this watershed map was created for schools K-12 within the watershed. Click here to view a larger version. Contact Us if you would like to receive a copy of the map.
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
Maine Water Company, The Saco Watershed Collaborative, Maine CDC and CEI Consultants have completed this interactive digital tool for source water protection. This StoryMap highlights the importance of protecting the Saco River's drinking water supply and the natural resources that contribute to its resilience, with a focus on the two subwatersheds located nearest to the drinking water intake – the Little Ossipee River and Lower Saco River.
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.