Eagle River Inventory and Assessment (2)

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4. Clearly define goals and make both sustainability and enhancing ecological integrity explicit goals. 5. Utilize the best available science in predictive assessments that are risk-based and decision-oriented. For inclusive decision-making, predictive assessments should link system manipulations to probable outcomes of primary interest to stakeholders: clean water, productive fisheries, other valued biota, reliable water supply, recreation, and aesthetics. 6. Honestly identify and openly debate key knowledge gaps and uncertainties. Adopt an action-oriented principle that ensures that the decision-making exercise will lead to results. 7. Make decisions in a transparent, organized framework that: • structures the problem clearly, • provides a ranking of the options even though the uncertainties may not be resolved in the foreseeable future, • involves stakeholders, • documents and justifies the decision process to stakeholders, and • provides research priorities by showing whether resolving particular uncertainties would affect the preferred option(s). 8. Watershed restoration projects are as much a social undertaking as an ecological one: understand social systems that may support or constrain restoration while establishing long-term personal, institutional, and financial commitments. 9. Some strategies will work, some won't, and some will take many years to assess. Be patient and learn through careful long-term monitoring of key ecological processes and biotic elements. Reevaluate and update the restoration strategy. 10. The best strategy is to prevent degradation rather than attempting to control or repair damage after it begins. The Eagle River Inventory and Assessment has been guided by these principles. Scientific literature on river restoration constructs a compelling case for making a system-level assessment of watershed processes the highest priority. Given the large body of existing information and data available for the watershed, an essential first step is translating fragmented disciplinary information into interdisciplinary understanding of processes. First and foremost, we have sought to adhere to this principle, identifying watershed-scale patterns in major stressors and alterations. Such effort necessitates investigations of hydrologic processes and instream flows, nutrient loading, metals loading, large-scale habitat loss and fragmentation, potential interactions between water quantity and quality, and future threats to ecological integrity. This approach is substantially different from assessments that generate reach-by- reach snapshots of physical habitat structure to target site-specific tactics. The frequent To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. "-Aldo Leopold "fie should be restoring the health of watersheds, not engineering habitat in stream reaches. ~e should be thinking across decades, not years. Strategies, not tactics should dominate environmental planning and management. "-James Karr Eagle River Inventory and Assessment ES-3