When Stroud Water Research Center restores a streamside forest, the trees go in as two-year-old seedlings. About five years in, the canopy overhead starts to close. A decade or two later, wood and branches begin falling to the forest floor, and the buffer has grown into the kind of mature forest that evolved alongside Mid-Atlantic and Northeast streams. The companies that help fund this work won’t see the full return within a typical three-year grant cycle. But the benefits to the watershed and its surrounding community are very real, and the Stroud Center has spent decades learning how to deliver them.
Based in Avondale, Pennsylvania, the Stroud Center is an independent nonprofit that advances knowledge and stewardship of freshwater systems through global research, education, and watershed restoration. While the Stroud Center takes on watershed restoration projects of many types, much of its work happens on private agricultural lands, where it works with landowners to put a suite of best management practices in place, such as planting forested buffers between farm activities and waterways, developing nutrient management plans, and reworking infrastructure to control runoff.
None of this work happens in a vacuum. Projects often begin with a grant application to funders like the USDA or the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, most of which require a hard-dollar match. That means the Stroud Center often commits to a project on the gamble that it will find funding partners to provide a match, private landowners who will commit to implementing improvements, and on-the-ground partners to contribute expertise and labor.
David Arscott, Ph.D., has led the Stroud Center as president and executive director since 2017. A freshwater ecologist, he earned his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and has studied aquatic ecosystems from the Alaskan tundra to New Zealand and Antarctica.
In this Q&A, David shares how the Stroud Center builds trust with the landowners at the heart of its restoration work, how it balances funder expectations with nature’s timelines, and why every company should understand its dependence on healthy water.
In its nearly 60-year history, the Stroud Center has taken on a lot of types of water restoration and education projects. Today, how do you determine where to focus your efforts? What factors play into those decisions?
The first consideration comes down to logistics and the geography of our team, collaborators, and partners. Our home base is in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, so much of our work focuses here. Any successful project starts with relationships. Most projects require collaboration with private landowners, so you need strong relationships there. Next is funding. Most of our work is externally sponsored, whether through grants or contracts, and our funders typically have priorities in terms of both outcomes and geographies.
Once the funding and geography are determined, we prioritize areas where we can aggregate enough projects to significantly impact a watershed. A one-off project on a 100-acre farm is wonderful, but when you zoom out, that area represents a small percentage of a watershed, so you’re probably not going to see that individual project have an impact on the water quality in area streams or rivers.
We can make good work even better by building synergies and connecting projects, so that’s what we try to do. That also adds complexity. We consider past performance, where we have funding, and where we see water quality in need. We put all of that together to prioritize where we can cluster or aggregate our work.
Your work often focuses on agricultural operations. Why do you consider that such an important area for the health of waterways and the planet?
Roughly half of the world’s habitable land is under some kind of agricultural management. That means if we can find solutions that work within our agricultural systems, the scale at which they can be deployed is enormous.
Humans have influenced the planet and its climate through many pathways. Fossil fuels are probably mentioned most often, but soils play a huge role, too, and that’s an area that interfaces directly with the farming community. The way we use soils to produce food has a significant impact on how much organic matter they store and how much water they absorb and retain. That’s why soil health and regenerative farming have become a growing focus in the agricultural sector.
Healthy soils matter for climate in two related but distinct ways, and they require different kinds of investment. The first is resilience, or how we adapt to a changing climate. That means landscapes that suffer less damage in a major flood, or soils that help crops withstand droughts. The second is reducing the carbon already in our atmosphere. Healthier soils can store more carbon, pulling CO2 from the air and helping to slow climate change.
Both come back to water. Soil rich in organic matter stores more carbon, and it also absorbs and holds more water, which reduces flooding and runoff, keeps sediment and nutrients out of our streams and rivers, and recharges the groundwater that communities depend on.
Do ideal watershed projects require a large geographic area and data measurement over an extended period of time?
Long-term monitoring is the gold standard. Measuring in-stream conditions over time gives us the most valuable data for adaptive management, and it’s the clearest way to show whether we’ve moved the needle on a stream’s health. But it’s also really challenging.
We’re typically looking at five- to 10-year timelines, and a lot can change in a watershed over that time. One major storm can skew the data, or a significant problem on a single property can mask all the other improvements we’re making. A new area can also prove challenging because we don’t yet have the relationships and trust to make the work possible. Expanding into a whole new territory is a big commitment of time and money, and not one we take lightly.
We commit to long-term monitoring when we know there is robust funding and a well-informed community invested in the work. And we always track near-term metrics alongside bigger-picture outcomes. Those measures give us, and our funders, meaningful information even if unpredictable factors shift the long-term picture.
You mentioned the timeline challenges in this kind of work, an issue that’s often discussed around investment in nature-based projects. How do you see timeline discrepancies play out in your work, especially as it relates to funding?
There’s a real timing mismatch in the funding model that I would argue is problematic for the future of humanity. Most grants are short-term, one to three years, and investment in longer-term research and monitoring is sparse. A short cycle of funding across the sciences means we lose long-term fidelity of datasets and the ability to analyze and compare 20 or 30 years into the future.
The Stroud Center has been around for nearly 60 years, and we’ve been most successful with our longer-term work through endowment, which has enabled us to piece together long-term research programs outside our doorstep on White Clay Creek. In my opinion, the endowment model should be the No. 1 priority for funders seeking long-term outcomes, but it does require an immense amount of trust in the recipient organization. We understand that funders have to think in terms of grant cycles, and while they may be committed to long-term performance, it’s also true that organizations change. Boards change. Staff changes. How can you trust that this organization is going to be doing X, Y, Z the same way you need it done for more than four or five years? This is an issue that needs systemic exploration and solutions.
Corporate entities partner with you on an array of projects. Why do corporate partners invest in this work? Why should they care about water health?
The cliché is that water is life. If the health of the environment and the aquatic ecosystems in a community are diminished or at risk, people are at risk. Ultimately, a happy, healthy community in the places where you do business improves business outcomes.
Most companies recognize this, but they should also absolutely understand their financial dependence on water and its quality. That’s an internal business assessment that should be part of any company’s overall risk assessment and supply chain management.
Do the same timing mismatches appear in your corporate projects around impact measurement and ROI?
In a sense, but our corporate partners are typically most interested in modeled outcomes. We can project or model what we think will happen, and they can use those modeled outcomes in their impact reporting.
For example, some companies have funded our work restoring forested riparian buffers, the ideal condition for streams and rivers in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Our long-term goal for these projects is mature forest. Funders understand that the full benefits take more than a decade to emerge, so there’s typically no expectation that we’ll track the system’s performance over that entire span and report back.
Can you give an example of a corporate project you’re working on now?
Sure. One example is a three-year program in Virginia that we launched in 2023 with Amazon Web Services. AWS has an intense focus on water sustainability and accountability, with a commitment to be water positive by 2030. The company understands the risks to its business if groundwater resources are not protected.
Through the project, we’re working with farmers and agricultural landowners in the Bull Run and Broad Run watersheds to improve cropland management by implementing soil health practices, including 2,300 acres of no-till planting and 2,300 acres of cover crop systems. The project is expected to return about 67 million gallons of clean water to recharge groundwater resources each year.
Education is also a big part of the Stroud Center’s mission. Can you speak to how that plays out in your work?
Our mission is to advance water knowledge, stewardship, and restoration, and we can’t achieve it without informed communities. That makes education central to everything we do.
Our programs serve all communities, but we put particular focus on providing educational tools and programs to under-resourced communities. Economic inequality shapes who has access to clean water, or enough of it. Low-income communities are far more likely to live in polluted environments, and they have historically had the least access to educational resources. Nearly all of our online tools and programs on freshwater systems and watersheds are free at WikiWatershed.org. We also offer student and youth programs, in schools or onsite at our 1,800-acre experimental watershed. Scholarships are available to provide this programming at reduced or no cost to schools and youth groups.
Education also plays an important role in our work with agricultural landowners. Farmers face a variety of pressures every day. If they’re approached about implementing something new on their land, most are rightly skeptical. Through grant-funded workshops, community events, and farm days, we create opportunities for them to learn about our programs and their benefits, ideally from farmers we’ve worked with in the past, as they’re often the strongest voices to communicate the benefits of this work to their peers.
Any other upcoming projects you’re excited about?
I’m excited about everything we do at the Stroud Center. But one project that’s bringing a lot of excitement and joy right now is our work with Silk Grass Farms, an innovative agribusiness and nature reserve in Belize.
In 2024, Stroud Center researchers visited Silk Grass Farms to conduct a baseline assessment of macroinvertebrate, fish, and microbial communities, as well as of the physical habitat and water chemistry on the farms. We identified 300 aquatic macroinvertebrate species, including 132 that had never before been DNA barcoded, nearly all of them first-time records for Belize. Now we will be returning every five to 10 years to measure and assess whether and how agricultural activities are affecting waterway health and biodiversity as Silk Grass Farms expands both its business and its regenerative agricultural practices.
