Planning a Watershed Risk Assessment

Managers, stakeholders and scientists begin their discussion of the focus, scope and complexity of the risk assessment during planning. They may also discuss the assessment's expected output and the technical and financial resources that are available or needed.

Scientists, managers and stakeholders all play a role in watershed risk assessment. Although others may be involved, the primary assessors are the scientists, and watershed managers are their primary clients for the assessment results. Managers (here meant to include watershed council leaders, local government staff or officials, water resources program leaders, public lands managers, etc.) need to describe why the risk assessment is needed and what they expect to do with the information they will receive. In turn, scientists need to communicate what they can realistically provide to the managers, where problems are likely and where uncertainty may arise. The quality of communication that occurs during this initial planning process heavily influences the success of the risk assessment.

Local watershed management efforts often involve many stakeholders, such as federal and state regulatory/trustee agencies, local governments and tribes, the regulated community (industry, land development, etc.), academia, environmental organizations, private corporations, landowners, citizens' groups and others. Planning may involve stakeholders in the dialogue to help ensure that the risk assessment is relevant to social concerns and that all the ecological resources of concern to stakeholders and others have been identified. Watershed risk assessment planning can be especially complex when there are multiple jurisdictional boundaries as well as many differing stakeholder interests. Stakeholder involvement needs to be initiated in the planning step and reestablished periodically during the assessment.

Before beginning the actual assessment, managers should agree on click for examples management goals for the watershed . Elements of existing goal statements from watershed councils, neighborhood conservation plans, or local growth planning strategies should be incorporated where appropriate. Significant effort may be needed to generate clearly worded management goals for the watershed. Public meetings, constituency group meetings and evaluation of resource management organization charters, are some methods to develop shared management goals. Although this essential step may delay the assessment, reaching agreement on watershed goals among diverse interests is valuable for interactions far beyond the assessment.

The goal should be supported by a set of more tangible management objectives , which a subgroup of the planning team may develop. The team members assigned to this task should understand ecological processes and the characteristics of the watershed being studied. Their important role is to translate the goal -- which may be very general, abstract and impossible to measure -- into management objectives that relate closely to the goal and can be verified when met. If site-specific water quality objectives are in place, they should be considered and may even be used as the management objectives if they are relevant to the valued ecological resources. The watershed goals and their objectives set the foundation for the risk assessment.

When watershed risk assessment planning is completed, participants should have:

• an idea of what issues the watershed managers want to address
• awareness of the stakeholders and their interests
• awareness of valued ecological resources that may be at risk
• overall ecological goal(s) and objectives for the watershed
• clear expectations for the assessment scope and products

Ecological Risk Assessment Flow Chart