I pledge to protect the watershed by working with a local land trust to protect acres of my wooded property with a conservation easement.
Assumptions
The sources of information for this calculation come from Annals of Forest Research. Throughfall, stemflow, and rainfall interception in a natural pure forest of chestnut-leaved oak (Quercus castaneifolia C.A. Mey.) in the Caspian Forest of Iran - S.M. Hosseini Ghaleh Bahmani, P. Attarod, V. Bayramzadeh, M.T. Ahmadi, A. Radmehr; the Urban Watershed Forestry Manual, USDA Forest Service; and American Forests. This pledge assumes that the Delaware River Basin has an average annual rainfall is 43 inches. It also assumes that 75% of rainfall reaches the forest floor. One acre of forest is estimated to be 450 trees. Thus, one acre of forestland can infiltrate and store as much as 9620 gallons of water from a half-inch rainfall. Therefore, in an average year, one acre of forest can infiltrate 827,213 gallons of water per year.