Instream Flows for Recreation: A Handbook on Concepts and Research Methods

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HANDBOOK GOALS This handbook is designed to address the need for more systematic, rigorous, and defensible information about instream flow needs for recreation. Recognizing that such a document cannot provide all the knowledge and skills needed to develop and integrate information from fields as diverse as hydrology, geomorphology, planning, and social psychology, the handbook is not intended to be a comprehensive guide for conducting flow - recreation studies. Instead, the handbook is conceived as a "road map" to the ideas and methods that are the basis of effective studies. Following this analogy, the handbook is viewed as a compact tool for locating important ideas and suggesting how those ideas fit together in the research landscape, much in the way a road map can help a visitor identify important points of interest and suggest a route for exploring them. The handbook's primary goal is to give researchers and the reviewers of research a common understanding of the issues involved in this kind of work. As opportunities to protect or maintain flows become apparent, interest groups, researchers, and resource managers will all need to participate in the development, execution, and review of flow - recreation studies. The more these groups can speak a common language, the better those studies will be. Just as importantly, a common set of research principles can keep researchers from reinventing the wheel with each new study. Most studies to date have focused on a particular river and been based on the work of a very few people and ideas. At the first national workshops on the subject (in Corvallis, Oregon in 1990, and Williamsburg, Virginia in 1991), many participants were surprised about the number of other people doing similar work. By presenting ideas from a number of studies, this handbook can also help establish formal links and encourage dialogue among researchers working in different parts of the country. Such dialogue is a key ingredient for significant advances in the field. A final hope for the handbook is to influence future studies so they become more compatible. Current studies, in addition to being conducted in a vacuum, also tend to focus 2 Instream flows affect the quality of a variety of recreation opportunities, including boating, fishing, hiking, and swimming. on single segments of rivers and finite sets of recreation activities. As a result, the flow needs for one river often cannot be compared with those from another. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, which is designed to address specific resource management needs. However, if data from enough rivers can be collected in a similar way, it may be possible to establish a link between flow needs for specific types of recreation and easily - measured hydrologic characteristics of rivers. Fishery biologists have managed to do this for a variety of aquatic species, and the resultant models have proved useful. A long -term goal of recreation research is to develop parallel models. Conducting studies and presenting data in similar ways, as suggested in this handbook, is a necessary first step in meeting this goal. HANDBOOK AUDIENCE The handbook is intended for a lay audience interested in the technical aspects of streamflow effects on recreation. Although conducting studies requires specialized technical skills and carefully developed research methods, the principles involved are comprehensible to non - specialists. With the handbook's help, earnest readers should be able to understand the logic of these studies and become critical consumers of them. The handbook is also intended for researchers and decision - makers. Researchers sometimes complain that their work is not used as often or as well as it should be, while