Restoration services must streamline their approach to conserving water bodies and ecosystems by prioritizing and implementing adaptive management solutions.
FREMONT, CA: Restoration services are evolving their approach with advances in watershed science. They target resource allocation in stream clearance, instream habitat modification, and sediment source abatement. Restorers need to accommodate emerging waterbody research will prevent the waste of resources, inability to evaluate the results of the restoration effort, and misunderstanding of environmental effects. Restoration efforts will not decrease environmental risks without a data-based strategy and approach to waterway restoration.
Restoration services must follow strategies to maximize their investments, efforts, and research.
Prioritization: Restorers prioritize protecting environmentally safe areas. A restoration strategy must start by protecting relatively healthy areas. Restoration cannot succeed without protecting key habitats, but protecting refugia can be effective without restoration. Landscapes should be protected from future degradation as part of a restoration process. Implementing best management techniques, acquiring and purchasing easements, and actively reducing the possibility of future perturbations will all contribute to protecting the environment.
To preserve maximum species and life history diversity within a river basin, an overall strategy for protection and restoration prioritizes river basins within a regional setting. At-risk aquatic species depend on the best remaining examples of ecosystem types in priority river basins and watersheds.
Restoring salmonoid ecosystems: A variety of habitats are important to Pacific salmon throughout their life history and depend on various ecosystem functions. Scientists have had difficulty predicting salmon population response to environmental change because salmon-habitat interactions are complex. Protecting and restoring salmon populations requires addressing the ecosystem as a whole. Ecosystem approaches to study how streams and rivers sustain salmon and other native fishes by closely monitoring the rates and patterns of processes like sediment flux and salmon migration.
Adaptive management: Coordinated activities are evaluated and refined incrementally as part of adaptive management. This process uses new information to modify existing decisions, which differs from traditional management because it recognizes uncertainty and limited knowledge. A regular evaluation of adaptive management plans based on successes and failures is an essential component of adaptive management. A regional restoration strategy faces several challenges, including consistently protecting, prioritizing, and treating private lands. Implementing or restricting a restoration strategy may require creating habitat conservation plans (HCP). Several small landowners need to be included in the HCP while maintaining a high level of protection for the refuge.
