The 18th Annual Water Conservation and Xeriscape Conference: Our Water, Our Future:
Communications Across Disciplines will be conducted in Albuquerque, NM. Early bird registration is until February 15, 2013! For more information and/or to register visit www.xeriscapenm.com.

For population growth to continue, water managers warn, Westerners must use less — and probably spend billions on high-tech recycling and desalination plants.

In just two weeks, Greeley residents lowered their water use enough to supply 640 homes with water for an entire year, the city’s water and sewer department reported.

According to a recent Science Daily article, researchers have invented a new toilet system that turns human waste into electricity and fertilizers. It also reduces the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 percent compared to current toilet systems. Dubbed the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet, it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes.

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter is promoting a campaign to substantially reduce water use in the Colorado River basin by the year 2020. The goal of the program is to reduce per-person daily water use in the Colorado River basin, and in communities that use water from the river, to 90 gallons per day. The figure includes only residential use, including landscape watering.

Fall is finally providing some relief after a summer when drought sent half the counties in the United States into disaster status. Images of dry river beds, parched fields and kernel-less corn filled airwaves across the county. La Plata County saw those same images up close as the Animas River shrunk to near-record lows and crops shriveled in parched fields.

Sponsored by the Colorado WaterWise Council. For more information and/or to register, visit www.coloradowaterwise.org.

The Colorado River Basin, a group of leading advocacy organizations, is launching a new campaign to urge the region's urban communities to do their part to put the Colorado River on a sustainable path after this drought year.

Managing our demand for water by implementing water conservation measures reduces the stress on the aquatic environment found in the streams and reservoirs that are the source of most of our local water supplies. As the stream flows diminish in a drought, water temperature goes up and habitat and refuge for fish and aquatic invertebrates goes down.