Abstract
Climate change, population growth, and declining federal budgets are threatening the health of ecosystems, and the services they provide. Under these changing conditions, managing landscapes and resources assumes new and unprecedented challenges. Adaptive management has been identified as a natural resource management approach that allows practitioners to incorporate change and uncertainty into decision-making through an iterative process that involves long-term monitoring and continued review and adjustment of management actions. However, the success of these efforts in watershed health relies on the collective and sustained monitoring of indicators, which is seldom studied. The purpose of this analysis is to examine (1) the practical challenge of choosing a list of indicators for long-term monitoring, (2) the negotiation process among stakeholders around the selection and interpretation of indicators, and (3) the communication tools that can be used to convey the assessment’s results and findings. To do this, we analyze our ongoing work in the Cienega Watershed in southern Arizona. Our analysis shows that the selective use of indicators, regular assessment and review, and establishment of partnerships among stakeholders are all important elements in establishing effective adaptive management efforts. The selection of indicators and data sources is a moving target that requires regular consensus and review among stakeholders. The assessment itself is also a powerful engagement tool with the public at large, providing legitimacy and support to land management decision-making. Here, we outline some lessons learned that can be transferred to other cases and identify potential barriers for engagement, decision-making, and project success.
Highlights
Watershed health is critical for the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services
Our analysis shows that the selective use of indicators, regular assessment and review, and establishment of partnerships among stakeholders are all important elements in establishing effective adaptive management efforts
We evaluated a number of different metrics, settling on using precipitation reported by the Western Regional
Summary
Watershed health is critical for the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services. Managing natural resources under these conditions of change and uncertainty becomes a major challenge. Management decisions at the watershed scale are critical in addressing the challenges and tensions between supply and demand of resources (Sadeghi et al, 2020). Watersheds have been identified as the best ecological unit for the management and governance of natural resources (Cohen, 2011). The expansion of urban infrastructure disrupts watershed hydrology — the magnitude and timing of runoff affecting streamflow and storage levels (Gorelick et al, 2020). Land management actions implemented by individual property owners (e.g., clearcutting, conversion of the natural landscape into cropland, real estate development, and other changes in land use), may have profound and cumulative implications on ecological processes at the landscape scale (O’Neill et al, 1997). To reinforce the cyclic nature of decision-making, institutional and technical learning must be incorporated into the AM framework (Williams & Brown, 2018)
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