The Forest Service, Water Yield, and Community Stability: Defining the Contours of an Agency Commitment to Include Land Grant Communities in the Timber Management Process

Acequia-based irrigation is one of the last vestiges of a traditional land use pattern practiced by Hispanic land grant communities in northern New Mexico.Fire suppression by the Forest Service in northern New Mexico's National Forests and Wilderness Areas significantly affects the yield of water available for acequia-based irrigation in downstream land grant communities.Impairing these communities' access to water as a consequence of timber management processes may violate pre-territorial property rights and statutory rights-of-way inhering in these communities as a result of nineteenth-century treaties and mining laws.At a minimum, these treaty rights and rights-of-way provide a historical and equitable, ifnot legal, foundation for a claim by these communities for permanent access to a suffitcient yield of water from upstream basins in National Forests in Wilderness Areas.These ancient rights, in tandem with the Forest Service's often expressed commitment to the stability of northern New Mexico's land grant communities, provide a precedent for agency acknowledgement of increased water yield as an explicit goal of timber management in both National Forests and Wilderness Areas.From summer rain to late spring snow showers, water falls on the highlands of northern New Mexico.Throughout the summer, melting winter snowpack and monsoon deluge saturate the soil of subalpine forested slopes, infiltrating the layers of pulverized granites and gneisses below.Gravity and montane contour unite to direct groundwater and surface runoff downslope into streambeds.Thereafter, the incipient streams swell, plunging downward, gouging canyons and valleys.Emerging from the upland watersheds, the streams pass through cultivated bottomlands between rolling hills of pifion and juniper, eventually finding their way to the Rio Grande.Aside from scarce annual precipitation in