Groundwater Is Fundamental To Surface Water
I think one of the fundamental things that people have to realize is that groundwater and surface water are interconnected and they are essentially the same thing. Groundwater percolates into the ground from surface water, and then it goes through the ground and comes out again as surface water in streams, and these streams flow to the reservoirs. The groundwater is what keeps the streams flowing when there is no rain. The groundwater creates conditions to have a habitat in the streams, habitat that will support fish and other aquatic organisms when it's not raining. If you have a stream that only flows when it's raining, you don’t have an aquatic environment anymore. You don't have fish, you don't have little organisms, you don’t have crayfish or water bugs, amphibians or anything like that. Groundwater is fundamental to the preservation of the quality of the surface water and ensures that there's some kind of a continuous, stable flow in streams.
Wilma Frey

Watersheds As Catch Basins
The reservoirs themselves represent a catch basin for very large areas. For me the buffers I view in the acreage of tens of thousands rather than a 300 foot strip, because the reservoirs are fed by streams, which come into intermittent streams. Like going from an artery to a capillary level where you have thousands and thousands of streams that are filtering the water coming into these reservoirs as a catch basin. If you just have a thin line of trees around the reservoir, that is not going to protect the capillaries. You need to have the entire mosaic resting in a forest matrix to really provide clean and plentiful water. Buffer is a start, but you really want this to be in a vast forest itself.
Eric Stiles

A Region Of Crystalline Rock
The Highlands region is a region of crystalline rock. Crystalline rocks are very old rocks, much older than anything else we have in the area, and they make this region that extends all the way from Connecticut down into Pennsylvania. These crystalline rocks, they were built during mountain-building events that were ancient, and they're strong against erosion, so they tend to stand high relative to the areas around them. So the topography, the woods, … everything really looks different in the Highlands compared to the lowlands in the east.
Alec Gates

Where The Glacier Scraped
New Jersey sits in a great spot geologically. The end of the glaciers went through Newark and out through Morristown and up across New Jersey. At the point where the glacier came down you have a mile thick sheet of ice that just scraped clean all the tops of the hills. So, you go out into the hills and you see these pavement surfaces of rock where the glacier has come down and pulled all the soil. As the glacier retreated, it was melting, and this would wash the soil back out of the glacier as it retreated. This would then dump the soil and sediment into the valleys in between those high spots. So now in the Highlands you have a system where the high spots are scraped clean, but out in the valleys you have relatively thick fill of glacier sediment. When we talk about water supply in the Highlands, there is a very complicated, double aquifer system.
Alec Gates

Images of a Continental Collision
The Highlands are ancient mountains. They represent just the remnants of some huge mountain system that was bigger then the Himalayas at one point – perhaps longer than, and at least as high. So we’re talking about huge mountains! We’re looking at the roots of them now. And there are still some places left in the Highlands where you can see how intense that deformation is. Those intense forces can still be seen in some of the rocks of the Highlands. For example, there’s an outcrop on Route 23 northbound that shows the folding of layers. These were layers that were laid down flat originally about 400 million years ago and then later, during a continental collision, the collision folded up the rocks. So the multi-colored folds that we see in the outcrop on Route 23 are the result of that squeezing that took place when the two continents hit each other and folded the rocks up because of that pressure.
Alec Gates

The Highlands as a Catch 22
A lot of people have moved to the Highlands because of quality of life. People are moving to those areas because of the huge forests, the beautiful hills, the vast wildlife. However it's that very desire to live there that's ecologically compromising the Highlands. It's a “Catch 22”, … being loved to death by ten acre lots that are grass and McMansion homes that consume large amounts of resources. … It's the impervious surface of new residential units that is primarily threatening the quality of water being exported. When you have about 10 percent of your watershed covered with asphalt or other impervious surfaces, the quality of the water really takes a nosedive as far as potability from the EPA standards. And again, that's that Catch 22: people are living there because it has clean water, it has vast forests, but they want to be that last one in the boat. That is, once I've moved out to this location, then no one else can build. It's human nature, but we need to figure out the broader impact of all those activities. Again it's an area that will be loved to death ecologically.
Eric Stiles