Restoring Resilience: Upland Condition Scores Show Major Progress
The Upland Condition Index scores in the Verde watershed have improved from 36% (D+) in 2020 to 49% (C) in 2025. The 2020 scores highlighted a need for upland restoration efforts, prompting land managers and partners to shift priorities and invest in new projects. Since then, agencies, organizations, and volunteers have funded and implemented a wide range of upland restoration activities across the watershed.
Human activities—such as unauthorized, user-created roads and overgrazing—can accelerate erosion and lead to gully formation. Process-based restoration addresses these problems by mimicking natural hydrologic processes. By understanding how water moves across the landscape, practitioners install structures that slow water down, allow sediment to settle, and help regrade incised channels. This keeps soil and water on the land, builds resilience, reduces erosion, improves wildlife habitat, and decreases sedimentation downstream.
Prescott National Forest identified Munds Draw as a priority subwatershed in need of upland restoration and brought the project to the Verde Watershed Restoration Coalition (VWRC). Implementation began in 2020 and included juniper thinning in grassland habitats and installing rock structures and juniper slash in gullies to slow erosion. Since the 2020 Report Card, restoration crews and volunteers have installed, repaired, and monitored 288 structures and thinned 575 acres at the Munds Draw site.
At Flowing Springs on the Tonto National Forest, partners installed pipe-rail fencing to close a degraded riparian and upland area to vehicle access. This area had experienced gullying and habitat damage. The first step in any restoration project is removing the stressor—in this case, vehicles. With vehicle pressure removed, VWRC partners will determine the next steps to support recovery.
Gully Busters is a community science program developed by the Verde Watershed Restoration Coalition and led by Friends of the Verde River and the Coconino National Forest. Community scientists collect data on accelerated erosion, helping land managers identify areas that need treatment and informing decisions about where to install erosion-control structures.
Working Together for Better Data: Watershed Partners Improve Water Quality Certainty
Despite years of sampling by watershed partners—including the Sierra Club, Verde River Institute, Friends of the Forest, and the Oak Creek Watershed Council—the water quality certainty score was the lowest score on the 2020 Report Card at 27% (F). This highlighted the need for a coordinated, watershed-wide effort. In response, Friends of the Verde River secured funding to launch a water quality monitoring program through ADEQ’s Community Science Alliance. Verde Watershed Restoration Coalition (VWRC) partners then worked together to develop a comprehensive, basin-wide water quality monitoring plan.
This plan now guides VWRC-coordinated sampling in partnership with ADEQ. Thanks to this strong collaboration and improved coordination, the watershed’s water quality certainty
score has jumped from 27% (F) in 2020 to 79% (B+) in 2025.
Improving the Science: Methodological Updates in the 2025 Report Card
The 2025 Verde Watershed Report Card incorporates several key methodological updates to improve indicator accuracy and better reflect stakeholder input. A new indicator—depth to groundwater—was added under the Water Quantity category based on stakeholder recommendations and was scored for both 2020 and 2025 to maintain comparability. The groundwater and surface water management BMPs indicator was removed due to inconsistent data availability inside and outside the Prescott Active Management Area (AMA). Likewise, the turbidity indicator was dropped because data were not available. The fish indicator was revised to focus on native species rather than nonnative fish, including stocked
sport species, to better align with ecological goals and stakeholder input. Finally, the Water Quality Index and Water Quality Certainty methodologies were updated using a new watershed-wide water quality monitoring plan, improving data reliability, consistency, and scoring transparency.
These refinements ensure that the Report Card continues to evolve as a trusted, science-based tool for guiding watershed priorities, tracking progress, and supporting adaptive management across the Verde watershed.