Last spring, my six-year-old son was working on an art project. He was coloring a salamander when he asked me for a brown crayon. I asked why he needed brown, and he answered matter-of-factly-"I want to color the water." The rivers and streams that course through our community of Charlottesville, Va., face a challenge that is common to many across the United States-excessive sedimentation is suffocating the life out of them. As the sediment in our region's rivers moves downstream, much of it settles in our community's primary reservoir, slowly displacing its capacity to store drinking water. In fact, over the next 50 years, it is expected that roughly half of the reservoir's storage capacity will be lost to dirt. To confront this ecological and economic challenge, the four jurisdictions that make up the majority of the Rivanna watershed (which encircles Charlottesville) formed the Rivanna River Basin Commission (RRBC). The commission recognized that it could not address the threat posed by excessive sedimentation without first understanding the sources, so it brought together a group of local water experts. They found that the most significant sedimentation appeared to come from instream erosion, and a growing body of evidence is now bolstering this conclusion.
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