Special Report No. 99-06: Silviculture and Water Quality: A Quarter Century of Clean Water Act Progress

While concerns about impacts to streams from forest management go back to the beginning of forestry in the United States, passage of the Clean Water Act substantially accelerated the development of state control programs. Forests cover one-third of the United States, but national summaries of state water quality reports have found that forestry activities contribute only a small fraction of the impairment to rivers and streams in the country. The trend found in EPA’s 305(b) reports is for forestry activities to have a diminishing contribution to impairment of rivers and streams.