The Little Tennessee Watershed Association (LTWA) is a conservation organization formed in 1993 in Franklin, NC to protect and restore the health and waters of the Little Tennessee River and its tributaries upstream of the Fontana reservoir through monitoring, education, habitat restoration, and citizen action. With around 140 members, the organization advocates for the conservation of the watershed in Macon County and its surrounding counties, helps protect and restore at-risk properties in the watershed, and maintains a biomonitoring program that charts the quality of aquatic life and biodiversity of the river.
History
In 1993, citizens, local government officials, and scientists attending a local watershed conference in Franklin recognized that accelerating growth and development were impacting the health of the Little Tennessee River watershed, and decided that they needed a strategy to protect water quality, aquatic life, and biodiversity in the watershed. The 200-plus people who participated decided that an organization was needed to lead the effort, and the LTWA was born.
From 1994 onward, the LTWA operated as an all-volunteer organization under the Southwestern North Carolina Resource Conservation and Development Council, part of the US Department of Agriculture's Natural Resource Conservation Service. In 1998, the LTWA hired its first paid staff member. It earned 501c(3) nonprofit status in 2001.
Activity in the watershed
The LTWA focuses broadly on biomonitoring, education, restoration, and advocacy.
Biomonitoring
The LTWA's biomonitoring program is headed by Dr. William McLarney, who began monitoring the Little Tennessee watershed in 1990, before the LTWA was founded. The data from this program provides a picture of the biodiversity of the watershed over the past 20 years, and is the largest fish-based biomonitoring database in the world for any comparably sized watershed. Throughout the program's history, over 2,000 volunteers have participated in field work and data collection at over 150 sites around the watershed, and data from the program appears in the Southern Appalachian Information Node database, making it accessible all over the world.
Education
The LTWA has provided informal courses as part of volunteer biomonitoring activities for individuals and groups from many organizations including Franklin High School, Macon Middle School, Upward Bound, Outward Bound, NCCAT, The Mountain Retreat Center, SAFC, interns at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, and many others. It played a major role in creating a Biomonitoring Curriculum for Macon County schools in partnership with Coweeta Hydrologic Lab and has worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority's "Kids in the Creek" program. It has also published several guides and publications about the watershed, including A Field Guide to the Fishes of the Upper Little Tennessee Watershed, a 71-page illustrated booklet about 68 species of fish in the watershed, Sediment in our Watershed, a 4-page brochure funded by the Little Tennessee Nonpoint Source with information about the problems of sediment, and The State of the Streams in the Upper Little Tennessee Watershed: A Report on Water Quality and Habitat Trends, 1990-2002 , which uses data from the biomonitoring program to illustrate the overall health of the watershed.
Restoration
In the past decade, the LTWA has partnered with the Macon Soil and Water Conservation District and local landowners to perform voluntary restoration projects on more than 3.4 miles of eroded stream bank, plant more than 10.3 miles of vegetative buffer, and install 4.6 miles of livestock fence along local waterways. The organization also collaborates with the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (also based in Franklin) to purchase, protect and restore at-risk tracts of land in the watershed.
Tessentee Farm
In 2008, the LTWA coordinated a volunteer effort to restore part of a 64-acre tract of bottomland and river bluff land at the junction of Tessentee Creek and the Little Tennessee River owned by the LTLT known as the Tessentee Farm back to its condition prior to the addition of a man-made pond and other landscaping.