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:l ~'')'''77 L, :J.,_ Quest 10n No. of Responses Table 5. Investigator's evaluation of project administration Modal Response No. in Hode II (14) II (16) 7 (12) 6 (11) 9 (12) 3.a. Staff attitudes to the project are... . ~ttitudes of each member to other members of project The mutale of project workers is .... ] .b. 3.d. 4.h. Should the project leader be an outstanding researcher? Should the project leader be an exc~llent administrat0r? 4. i. 16 Favorable 16 Favorable 16 High 16 Important \6 Important ~: Responses to the questionnaire administered to SJEP investigators by Benton & Meiman in mid-1975 (See Appendix A). Questions condensed from the actual forIn used. All questions were scored by each respondent on B Bcale with 7 classes. The modal response is the one used most frequently by respondents. For range of modal response classes, see Appendix A. Values in parentheses are for the modal class and the two adjacent ones. SAN JUAN ECOLOGY PROJECT Phau I Plan"'i~ Group Sreeri",g Comm. Project Plan Phose I Reparl ResearCh Proposals , Appoin1r , , , I _E~OE~~_J Phose II , , I , , L ~~~a.!!~n___ jReseorCh rExecution I Quarterly Reports Inlerim Reports Final Reporf Figure 1. The structure. of the San Juan Ecology PToject. Phase 1 and Phase II are separated in time. The arrows within each phase represent flo~s of information. Proposals directed at these components were then sought. At CU, a team of interested researchers was located and these workers were then asked to iden- tify problems and produce proposals. Funding decisions were made on the basis of indi- vidual proposals rather than a single all-inclusive proposal for the entire pro~ect. This fllte~in~ meant that, budget constraints aside, it became impossible to integrate SJEP as an ecosystem study. The decisions on funding also produced most of the early tensions in the project, generating a sense of competition between the two main university groups rather than between subprojects. During Phase II, tbe formal pTocess of reviewing research progress was entirely internal to SJEP and was carried out by the Steering Committee and the Bureau of Reclamation. This procedure also intro- duced bias to evaluations which tended to maintain extant research projects rather than to introduce new ones, though some modification of ongoing projects did occur in the final years of SJEP. The lack of ~Jo~ ~han~~B 1n ~naBe II of SJ~V may, of course, indicate that the right decisions were made at the end of Phase I. Thr~e ~o~ents about the structure shown in Figure 1 are worth consideration here. They are the questions of public involvement, reviews of research progreSB~ and separation of Phase I and Phase II wo~~. Each at the~e topics ~ould have been approached differently under SJEP. A final para- graph in this section suggests areas of research omitted from SJEP which we now feel should have be.en included. Public involvement in SJEP, whether for defining research needs or 1n information exchange, was sli~ht. At ehe start of the project, some recog- nition of local (i.e. Colorado) environmental concern is implicit in the decision of the Bureau of Reclamation to seek a research team from in-state institutions, but du~ing ~hase II these concerns have been met only by Project Skywater Newsletters and infrequent news releases. Were the project to be initiated in 1976, this situation would not be duplicated, if only tn responSe. to a higher level of political interest in research expenditures. Perhaps because they consider a geographical area in which a la~ger population would be directly impacted by additional snowfall, Cooper et al. (1974) ahow a greater recognition of the social impli- cations of snowpack augmentation than appeared in the San Juan Ecology Project. In SJEP, the planning group was initially directed by the Bureau of Reclamation not to investigate social or economic questions. The internal review and evaluation of research progress in the SJEP was probably inconsistent since a st~ndard policy was never stated explicitly. This deficiency seems to have developed from the early 25