Preparing a Land Use Plan
When preparing a land use plan, a watershed manager needs to:
- Predict what will happen to water resources with future land use changes.
- Obtain consensus on the most important water resource goals in the watershed.
- Develop a future land use pattern for the subwatersheds that can meet those goals.
- Select the most acceptable and effective land use planning techniques to reduce or shift impervious cover.
- Select the most appropriate combination of other watershed protection tools to apply to individual subwatersheds.
- Devise an ongoing management structure to adopt and implement the watershed plan.
Notes:
Land use planning is best conducted at the subwatershed scale (i.e., 1 to 10 square miles), where it is recognized that stream quality is related to land use and impervious cover. One of the goals of land use planning is to shift development toward subwatersheds that can support a particular type of land use and/or density. The basic goal of the watershed plan is to apply land use planning techniques to redirect development, preserve sensitive areas, and maintain or reduce the impervious cover within a given watershed.