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Whole Watershed Restoration Planning Tools for Estimating Tradeoffs Among Multiple Objectives
Citation:
Mckane, Bob, B. Barnhart, J. Halama, P. Pettus, A. Brookes, Joe Ebersole, AND K. Djang. Whole Watershed Restoration Planning Tools for Estimating Tradeoffs Among Multiple Objectives. Presented at 2016 Society for Ecological Restoration Northwest Regional Conference, Portland, OR, April 04 - 08, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This invited symposium talk for the 2016 Society for Ecological Restoration Northwest (SERNW) Conference will describe how EPA’s VELMA ecohydrological model and other decision support tools are being applied in collaboration with tribes and community stakeholders to address restoration of hydrological and ecological processes critical to the functioning of whole watersheds and the ecosystem services they provide. The SERNW Conference will bring together scientists, restoration professionals, and government agencies involved in the practice and science of ecological restoration and management in the Pacific Northwest. The conference provides an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with a regional audience of restoration experts, and to highlight how EPA is assisting communities engaged in watershed restoration and salmon recovery planning.
Description:
We developed a set of decision support tools to assist whole watershed restoration planning in the Pacific Northwest. Here we describe how these tools are being integrated and applied in collaboration with tribes and community stakeholders to address restoration of hydrological and ecological processes critical to salmon recovery, and more broadly, to the functioning of entire watersheds and the ecosystem services they provide. For the 209 km2 Mashel River Watershed in southwestern Washington, we used a spatially-distributed watershed simulator – VELMA (Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments) – to quantify effects of alternative forest management and climate scenarios on ecosystem service tradeoffs. Using forest management scenarios with harvest intervals of 40, 80 or 120 years, in combination with projected changes in climate, we used VELMA to estimate tradeoffs in the capacity of the Mashel Watershed to provide timber, clean water, flood protection, climate regulation, and habitat for threatened salmon populations. A 3-D landscape visualization tool – VISTAS (Cushing et al. 2009) – is being used to summarize and communicate projected tradeoffs to resource managers and stakeholders in an intuitive way. An important goal of this and other Northwest case studies is to identify management practices for mitigating and adapting to climate change. In particular, to more effectively support salmon recovery planning, multi-objective optimization methods are being applied to VELMA to prioritize where and what kinds of in-stream, riparian and upland restoration practices will be most effective for improving cold water refuges, spawning and rearing habitat, and hydrologic flow regimes (higher summer flows and lower peak flows).