Parsing Ecological Impacts in Watersheds

Abstract

Watershed-level thinking implies recognition of chemical and nonchemical stressors as well as other natural or anthropogenic stressors, in an entire drainage area. This editorial highlights the reemergence of watershed-level thinking by the regulatory community, identifies new and emerging watershed-level assessment methods and underscores the benefits to stakeholders by integrating a watershed-level assessment with economic, social, legal and political factors that affect management and engineering decisions in watersheds. Civil and environmental engineers can play a critical role in the further evolution of watershed-level thinking by developing tools to identify the likely contributors to key assessment benchmarks representing indications of an ecosystem's impairment, and assisting in the selection of appropriate remedial responses.