The focal area atlas in your hand is the first edition of what is hoped to be a dynamic document that will be regularly used and updated. It has been compiled by many individuals who are part of the San Juan-Chama Watershed Partnership (SJCWP).

The mission of the SJCWP is to protect and enhance the watershed health and water supply conditions in the San Juan-Chama region. The region encapsulates the entire Rio Chama watershed as well as the headwaters of three tributaries of the San Juan River (Navajo River, Little Navajo, and Rio Blanco) which get diverted into the Rio Chama as part of the San Juan-Chama Project. These watersheds are exceptionally important to residents and downstream water users. The 2020 Forest Action Plan showed this region as having the highest possible ranking in the state for supplying the greatest population of Native American communities and Spanish/Mexican land grant communities with water. In addition, the San Juan Chama Project, which diverts water from the San Juan River basin into the Rio Chama, is the most important watershed area in terms of surface water resources for New Mexican public water systems. The native Rio Chama water and dam infrastructure conveys the San Juan-Chama Project water into the Rio Grande where it eventually makes up about 75% of Albuquerque’s drinking water and 50% of Santa Fe’s drinking water annually. With the extraordinary importance of the San Juan-Chama region, there is a need to protect the watersheds against the effects of severe wildfire and post-fire erosion.

In 2019, partners in the San Juan Chama-Watershed Partnership (SJCWP) obtained grant funding to update geographic priority areas for watershed protection needs. This task, however, proved challenging due to the large landscape size of
the San Juan-Chama region, the amount of area at risk of severe wildfire in several parts of the region, and the many local values at stake. Rather than assigning priorities to areas, partners decided to identify watershed-based “Focal Areas”
that partners may use to conduct their own watershed planning and prioritization. Continued funding for watershed planning allowed us to expand this framework into an Atlas to share with land management partners.

Our goals for the SJCWP Focal Area Atlas are as follows:
1. Use both local and scientific knowledge to help identify watershed protection issues and needs in the SJCWP landscape.
2. Describe watershed areas, land jurisdictions, relevant planning and implementation efforts, and important values at risk within mid-scale watershed areas.
3. Use spatial products from the New Mexico Forest Action Plan to show threat of severe wildfire and threat of postfire erosion for mid-scale watershed areas in the SJCWP region.
4. Show potential treatment locations for dry and mesic forest types that are accessible to forestry machinery.
5. In 2022 NMFD submitted these Focal Area boundaries to the NM Shared Stewardship Portal. The Atlas is designed to help provide context for these areas and to aid in land management planning.
6. Make this information available so that partners can more easily list relevant planning and implementation efforts for an area while applying for new grant funding.