​Strategic Watering

What is Strategic Watering? 
Strategic Watering is an applied synthesis of the science on Forest Moisture Circulation, “FMC” (detailed to the right), to rehydrate droughted forests in ways that they attract, circulate and/or catalyze rainfall and other forms of net positive precipitation over large landscapes.

Strategic Watering can easily be used to interrupt and reverse wildfire conditions with a few thousand gallons deployed correctly. The strategy maximizes forest moisture-sharing over contiguous forest systems by rehydrating superlative trees in strategically-located groves, thus extra-exponentially increasing the value and efficiency of the waterer’s initial water inputs.

Why Trees and Forests?
Trees and forests are evaporative-cooling towers, more or less. ​They’re also the biggest, living stores of moisture on a landscape. Behaviorally, they survive and thrive by circulating moisture through the air, close to their canopies, across great distances, sharing with each other from place to place across the continents. In so doing they create the weather we love: calm, cool and productive. Yes, bigger is better.  The bigger the forest infrastructure and its trees, the bigger the benefits of watering trees to prevent drought.

How to Locate: hub, conduit or edge.
You can apply this at any scale. Strategic Watering looks at a whole forest system’s footprint, infrastructure-quality, and known atmospheric moisture flows, at varying scales, then locates two Rainmaking with Trees projects inside an identifiable hub or conduit zone, such as the Eugene, Oregon area in the Pacific Northwest. There are many, many locations around the world for strategic watering. Tree quality is most important.

Moving Moisture Over Large Landscapes
Forests channel atmospheric moisture into “livable climate“, biospheric abundance, and thus life-security on land. Choosing the right location for Strategic Watering depends on your project goals, the shape of your given forest, that forest system’s proximity to active airborne moisture flows, dominant winds, and water availability.

Strategic Watering scales and usually brings transformative results within about 10,000 gallons’ (half of a swimming pool) worth of trickle-in water 25 18”-diamter, large-canopy trees (200 gallons each). Old growth trees are far more effective. Effects vary between level of isolation, level of dehydration, level of atmospheric drought, level of soil drought, and the varying ways conifer and deciduous forests bring precipitation, but this scale of application can be relied on for wildfire mitigation over large areas due to dehydrated living and dead forest material.

While Rainmaking with Trees focuses on addressing each tree’s individual hydration needs in a grove, Strategic Watering focuses on locating and aligning the Rainmaking with Trees protocol according to regional, continental and global FMC flows. By working with “the biggest players on the field” (large trees) in the most advantageous locations, we maximize moisture airborne supply and sharing.

Why Strategic Watering
Strategic rehydration of forests is the most effective, efficient and beneficial way to move moisture over large landscapes. How do we know this?Trees and Forests are how rivers and land life were most often established over the eons of life on Earth. According to the science, it is the inward-creeping forests that bring moisture circulation inland. Forests and trees are 100s of millions of years older than humans, and super-human in their moisture-sharing abilities. In times of erosion and drought trees and forests simply need gentle, careful, slow rehydration of their natural, biological wellbeing to refill themselves and initiate drought condition resolution at larger scale. That’s what trees do. They are built to share. Trees = Rain, once hydrated. Water them. Relax. Let them do what they do and eliminate drought conditions.

How Fast Until Change
Conditions are everything. The confluence of vegetative-, soil-, and atmospheric- moisture statuses defines precipitation received. An exceptionally droughted-system with zero atmospheric moisture cannot magically make it rain. These things have to build up. Depending on the condition of the individual trees and resources in a given forest system—living and non, and available moisture resources in the air, it can take anywhere from hours to days to see precipitation and rainfall come.

Above:  The Five Layers of Forest Moisture Circulation: Micro to Global.  

Below:  A simple model identifying macro FMC paths, conduits and hubs one at continental scale in the Pacific Northwest USA. The blue dots trace forested areas as shown on Google Maps.

Below: Strategic Watering sites from The NorthWest Projects: 2024.