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Chapter
10: Ecosystem and Watershed Management
Discussion Questions
Exercises
Links
Summary:
As we embark
on the challenges of managing natural resources, lands, and waters in
the new century, two related approaches have emerged as guiding paradigms:
ecosystem management and watershed management. These approaches are still
evolving, but already they show great promise from considerable experience
at both the national and local level in the United States. International
experience indicates that they have universal applications.
Ecosystem and watershed management share several common principles. They
are fundamentally scientific, aiming to base decisions on the best available
technical data and information. They aim also to add to the body of knowledge
about natural systems and solutions through experimentation, monitoring
and evaluation, and adaptive management. The approaches integrate different
scales of space and time. Ecosystem projects may be small in scale but
should be viewed as part of larger landscapes. Watersheds are "nested";
catchment projects should be guided by plans for the larger basins that
contain them. Plans are guided by history, and have a long time horizon
necessary to achieve a sustainable future.
Ecosystem and watershed solutions should integrate a range of regulatory
and nonregulatory methods into innovative packages that also address compatible
objectives like natural hazard mitigation, recreation, water supply protection,
and other economic benefits. The solutions aim to both protect and restore
natural systems. As such, management is a more encompassing term than
protection.
Finally, these approaches are collaborative, aiming to engage a wide range
of participants and stakeholders not only in gathering information and
viewpoints, but also in formulating decisions and implementing plans.
The collaborative and adaptive nature of EM and WSM is perhaps their greatest
quality, the characteristic that will sustain them well into the future.
We have seen many examples of how WSM has become a social movement, engaging
not only agencies, but also businesses, landowners, citizen groups, and
schoolchildren in planning, monitoring, and implementing restoration and
protection projects. This will give these approaches their staying power
as they develop social, intellectual, and political capital. In addition,
their adaptive nature fosters change, improvement, and evolution as participants
learn better ways to provide for the needs of people within functioning
natural ecosystems.
Discussion questions
1. Ecosystem and watershed management are often characterized as the "integration
of science and politics." Select three examples of watershed management
given in Chapter 4, which have ecological objectives, and use them to
describe how this characterization comes to life in practice.
2. "The principles of ecosystem management and watershed management
are the same." To what extent do you agree or disagree with this
statement? Briefly explain.
Exercises
1. The issue of scale is very important in watershed management. Using
government sources, for your region, characterize the nested scales of
watersheds from catchments to basins, and describe and critique the nested
scales of institutional arrangements for watershed management from the
subwatersheds to the basins.
2. Go to EPA’s Surf Your Watershed website, http://www.epa.gov/surf,
locate your subbasin, and prepare a two page summary of information for
your watershed, including the index of watershed indicators.
3. There are literally thousands of local watershed groups in the U.S.
working through mostly volunteer efforts to restore and protect waters
and watersheds. Starting with the EPA’s Watershed Success Stories,
URL, identify three cases not in the chapter’s box 10.3 and one not
from this EPA source. Write a two page comparative review of the three
cases, including information on scale, participants, activities, funding,
and funding courses.
Weblinks
Center for Watershed Protection: http://www.cwp.org
EPA Watershed website: http://www.epa.gov/OWOW/watersheds
Society for Ecological Restoration: http://www.ser.org
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