The Beaver Watershed Alliance is a nonprofit organization in Northwest Arkansas that aims to protect and enhance the water quality of Beaver Lake and surrounding watersheds. Recently, the organization received a grant for more than $600,000 from the Arkansas Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency to continue this work. Ozarks at Large’s Casey Mann spoke to Becky Roark, the alliance’s executive director, about the grant project.
Beaver Watershed Alliance Executive Director Becky Roark says the goal is to come up with a more holistic way to improve the region’s water quality.
“This grant is going to help us understand flooding and stormwater issues across the urban areas. So when we have that data, then we can work with the cities.”
The money comes from the Arkansas Department of Agriculture Section 319 grant program and will provide the nonprofit with funds to complete three future nature-based projects. Aidan Duncan, director of communications at the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, wrote in an email that the nearly $350,000 federal grant, along with about $268,000 of community funding, will enhance the alliance’s smart growth initiatives.
Roark says smart growth initiatives involve planning ahead for potential issues and using data to guide development. The cities selected for the nature-based projects are Fayetteville, West Fork, and Rogers. Roark says this grant is necessary to bolster projects throughout the Beaver Lake watershed.
“Sometimes projects sit in the queue for five or 10 years before you actually get funded for them. So in this case, we've been wanting to do something with West Fork for a long time at Riverside Park. It’s right there on the West Fork of the White River. So this is going to enable us to do something there.”
The alliance aims to restore natural environments and processes through these initiatives. Roark says that can include projects as simple as installing rain gardens and permeable pavers — which allow water to seep through paved surfaces into the ground — to bigger plans like the revegetation of riparian zones, areas between land and rivers.
These projects help increase rainwater absorption. According to the Beaver Watershed Alliance’s website, when areas of land that reduce water absorption exceed 10%, it can degrade a region’s water quality. These are known as impervious zones — think of roads, sidewalks, and even rooftops.
“So in most of east Fayetteville is roads and parking lots and schools and homes and all those things we need. But it’s really shifted a lot of stormwater to Town Branch, and that is an impaired waterway.”
Another key component of the grant is to develop a riparian management plan — essentially a framework for local governments to gauge the health of these riverbanks and guide environmental protection efforts. Roark says that managing water health projects in a rapidly growing region like Northwest Arkansas requires work beyond city borders.
“Because stormwater does not know jurisdictions. When it rains, it’s not saying, ‘Oh, I gotta stop here.’ So it’s a regional thing, so we should be looking at it regionally. And watersheds are the same thing. They don’t follow jurisdictional lines. They follow a geographical line.”
City efforts to implement plans will contribute to the grant program’s community match requirement. Duncan wrote in an email that 60% of grant funds are provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and 40% are provided by the nonfederal sponsor. The community match can include financial and in-kind contributions. Roark says time spent at meetings and volunteer tree planting will also count toward the match.
The grant project follows a three-year timeline. The Beaver Watershed Alliance plans to select a firm to conduct a flooding and hotspot modeling assessment by January 2026, which Roark says will take about a year to complete. Then, the alliance will develop the riparian assessment and management plan and begin working on city implementation. The three nature-based solution projects will follow.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
