NORWAY — A website has been established to raise money to plant trees in the Crooked River watershed and other watersheds throughout New England.

Lee Dassler of the Western Foothills Land Trust recently announced the partnership of the Land Trust, in Norway, and the nonprofit Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, based in Massachusetts, in a newly developed web-based program called the Clear Water Carbon Fund (www.clearwatercarbonfund.org).

“Recognizing the integral relationship between a forested watershed upstream and clean drinking water downstream, the fund will provide white pines to be planted on lands that have been open for more than 10 years and that are within the watershed,” Dassler said in a statement released this week.

Dassler said that any watershed landowner who is interested in having trees planted must make a commitment to retain the trees for at least 40 years. Dassler said if there are hay fields on the proposed tree planting site, money will be available to compensate owners for the loss of hay income on an annual per acre basis.

Last summer, volunteers conducted a watershed survey of the 50-mile Crooked River in which they documented, identified and prioritized about 200 non-point-source pollution sites, including more than 100 sites of erosion, in the watershed for eventual remediation.

The Crooked River Watershed is in the towns of Bethel, Greenwood, Stoneham, Albany, Waterford, Norway, Harrison, Otisfield, Naples and Casco in Oxford and Cumberland counties. The watershed has a drainage area of approximately 120 square miles.

The Crooked River flows in a southeasterly direction and receives numerous small tributary inputs along the way before joining with the Songo River just before flowing into Sebago Lake, which then flows into Casco Bay via the Presumpscot River.

Water quality monitoring found that the Crooked River is exhibiting signs of stress that is likely the result of polluted runoff that flows into the river from its surrounding watershed, officials said. The rising development pressure throughout the watershed is an anticipated source of this stress, said Dassler in that 2011 report.

The CWCF site was created and will be maintained by Manomet. Visitors to the site are invited to make voluntary carbon offset contributions. Dassler said there are tools on the site to calculate carbon offsets if desired, and contributions can be directed to specific watersheds in the program.

Dassler said the program already has resulted in the planting of pines within the upper Connecticut River watershed on agricultural lands whose riparian buffers were heavily damaged by Hurricane Irene last August.

In Maine, the Western Foothills Land Trust has been looking actively for planting sites and willing landowners.

Dassler said any owner of open lands within the watershed who have been in agriculture or are retired sand pit sites and would welcome protecting the water quality of the river by allowing trees to be planted should contact her at 739-2124 or [email protected].

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