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Soil Conservation Service staff analyzed alternative land treatment plans to show the costs of reducing sediment to the Trinity River from the Grass Valley Creek Watershed for the Bureau of Reclamation's debris dam study. A field inventory of erosion and sediment yield was made in August 1985. The field data was analyzed and an interdisciplinary team of specialists selected land treatment practices to solve the identified problems.

 

Costs and potential sediment reduction were determined for each practice by the interdisciplinary team. The Lotus 1,2,3 program was used to rank all the practices by cost-effectiveness (dollars of cost per ton of sediment reduction). The practices were then listed by rank to form alternative land treatment plans. Seven alternatives were developed and their costs and percent of total watershed sediment yield reductions were compared .

 

Alternative 4 is the recommended plan. It would involve continuing commercial timber harvest in subwatersheds I and II, trading out all comme rcial timber holdings in subwatersheds III, IV and V and installing enough land treatment practices to achieve an eight percent reduc tion in total sediment yield from the water shed. Alternative 4 would achieve about 11,300 tons of sediment r eduction at a cost of about $7,500 per year , This is about $.65 per ton of sediment reduction.