Watershed Health: The Need for a New Perspective
Abstract
Watershed health is a measure of the condition of the aquatic ecosystem within a watershed and is indicated by a specific set of environmental conditions that provide desired ecological, social, and legal amenities. A watershed is deemed "healthy" if it has these attributes and the traditional management approach to maintaining or developing a healthy watershed is to create and maintain these specific conditions within the watershed. However, this approach may not be applicable to situations in which processes are complex, non-linear, and poorly understood. The focus on a specific set of conditions comes at the expense of recognizing the ecological processes that create and maintain habitats for an aquatic organisms and the ecological context in which they evolved, and may lead to further degradation or compromising of the ecosystems and landscapes of interest. An emerging perspective suggests that aquatic-riparian ecosystems possess a range of processes and attributes that are inherently complex, nonlinear, and dynamic and because of the variation in the size and asynchronous nature of disturbance events, conditions will vary over time among watersheds, resulting in a mosaic of biophysical conditions across the landscape. Thus, watershed health may not be a single condition but rather a suite of conditions similar to how terrestrial ecosystems are viewed, requiring an integrated assessment of a range of ecological conditions and consideration of the intactness of key ecological processes.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.H31C1527R
- Keywords:
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- 0434 Data sets;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0496 Water quality;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1825 Geomorphology: fluvial;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1879 Watershed;
- HYDROLOGY