Eagle River Inventory and Assessment (2)

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Fortunately, a wide variety of water quality, hydrologic, and other types of data have been collected in the basin, albeit often for disparate purposes and using variable protocols. Many of the existing data sets collected have been examined in the context of individual projects or agency goals related to some specific aspect of water quality or management, as opposed to basin-scale assessment, management, and restoration of ecological integrity. Nonetheless, the large body of existing data coupled with field reconnaissance provided a sufficient basis to identify general patterns and trends in system characteristics, key stressors, and potential benefits of various management and restoration activities. Although some questions were answered during this effort, numerous questions remain and many new questions arose. Ultimately, the results of the Eagle River Inventory and Assessment point to the necessity of an ongoing adaptive management effort in the region. Adaptive watershed management may be described simply as a process of: 1, setting goals, 2, taking actions based on the best available information, 3. conducting a monitoring program designed to answer specific questions linking the goals and actions, and 4. updating and improving management based on program results. ES.1 PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT / STAKEHOLDERS In laying the groundwork for the Eagle River Inventory and Assessment, the Eagle River Watershed Council conducted extensive stakeholder outreach to identify and better define the most pressing issues and potential restoration activities throughout the basin prior to CSU involvement. The CSU project team subsequently communicated with hundreds of individuals from watershed stakeholders to key scientific experts. This work, along with the previous efforts of the Eagle River Watershed Council, were instrumental in identifying critical questions about the watershed as well as identifying the set of candidate restoration projects. This approach was augmented through field reconnaissance, statistical analysis, and amulti-criterion decision analysis to rank the ecological effectiveness of potential projects. ES.2 WATERSHED RESTORATION PRINCIPLES IN THE EAGLE RIVER INVENTORY AND ASSESSMENT Previous watershed management and restoration activities throughout the U.S. have been plagued by an emphasis on localized tactics that are not part of an overarching strategy addressing the underlying causes of degradation at the system level. While restoring a reach of river may provide a tangible sense of accomplishment, such projects often have little system-level benefit, especially if the restored reach has inadequate streamflows or is contaminated with pollution. Alternatively, identifying and removing chronic stressors at the system level and strategically prioritizing the restoration of segments that reconnect existing high quality habitats, such projects can have synergistic benefits for large segments of the watershed. Thus, to be successful in the long term, watershed restoration requires a f®cus ®n pr®tecting and rest®ring the watershed processes that create and sustain habitats as opposed to engineering habitats using a piece® meal, `band®aid' approach to achieve a static condition. Scientific literature and numerous case studies indicate the likelihood of successful watershed restoration is greatly improved by adhering to these ten principles: 1. Address the causes of problems and not just symptoms, i.e., focus on ecosystem processes rather than achieving a particular condition. 2. Recognize many scales and potentially limiting factors, such as nonpoint source pollution or chronic flow shortages. Along-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary perspective is critical. 3. Work with rather than against natural watershed processes and reconnect severed linkages (e.g., channels and floodplains). Eagle River Inventory and Assessment ES-2