Community-Based Monitoring and Dam Removal: Stakeholder Collaboration and Learning for Social-Ecological Resilience

As momentum builds for dam removal throughout the US, monitoring will be critical for both scientists and managers to assess and respond to the geophysical and biological impacts of these disturbance-causing yet potentially regenerative events. Community-based monitoring, a form of citizen science that involves members of a local community in scientific monitoring, is one approach to data collection that can simultaneously deepen public engagement in watersheds, connecting communities with science and their environment.

Recent research in the environmental social sciences points to community-based monitoring as a way to catalyze social learning, a crucial process for bolstering social-ecological resilience in the face of uncertainty. Through social learning, diverse stakeholders share, integrate, and ultimately co-produce knowledge relating to natural resource management. Because dam removals are characterized by high levels of uncertainty, community-based monitoring is a tool that can potentially bring together stakeholders to adaptively integrate research, decision-making, and action, as has been shown in other contexts such as forests and rangelands. However, few studies apply an educational research lens to study the ways learning occurs in natural resource management and what outcomes this yields for stakeholders.

To investigate the processes that underpin social learning in the context of dam removal, we use qualitative social science and educational research methods to study three sites in the Western US where planning efforts for the removal of obsolete dams are underway. In each case, local organizations with diverse goals - ranging from scientific understanding to restoration to environmental education - are co-leading community-based monitoring efforts. Semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and focus groups lend insight into how unique elements of these monitoring projects (e.g. power dynamics between groups) may influence learning processes for both individual participants and the larger stakeholder network. Ultimately, we hope to illuminate both how and what learning takes place in community-based monitoring, as well as the implications of this for people-place relationships, watershed management, and social-ecological resilience.