Reconciling working landscapes with Endangered Species Act (ESA) requirements is a vexing challenge playing out in watersheds across the western United States. Beaver-related watershed restoration (BRR) methodologies have the potential to reconcile competing demands for resource extraction and recovery of ESA-listed species by restoring ecosystem functionality more effectively and at...
The concept of ecosystem services broadens perspectives on nature to include not only intrinsic value but also the utilitarian value it provides to society. Viewing nature through this lens informs our understanding of how particular ecological processes benefit different actors. In this research, I examine how water utilities in the...
In the western United States, climate change is likely to bring greater uncertainty and extreme events outside the range for which water infrastructure, governance, and allocation mechanisms have been designed. In addition, many water systems already struggle with issues of institutional fragmentation, ineffective governance, and unsustainable management practices. Adaptive capacity,...
The concept of "adaptive governance" represents a spectrum of hybrid approaches to environmental governance employed to guide management of complex social-ecological systems under conditions of high uncertainty. While the concept of adaptive governance has benefited from over a decade of theoretical development, empirical examples of transitions towards adaptive governance are...
Adaptive collaborative (co-) management has received increased recognition as a novel approach to environmental governance that combines the dynamic learning features of adaptive management with the linking and network features of collaborative management. This approach is concerned with fostering sustainable livelihoods and ecological sustainability in the face of uncertainty and...
The conservation community has long recognized the critical role that agricultural landowners play in efforts to improve fish and wildlife habitat in order to recover threatened and endangered species. In many rural areas dominated by agricultural working landscapes, government agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) struggle to...
This study explores how environmental governance mechanisms affect state management of forest roads to address the chronic delivery of sediment to streams in Oregon, Washington, and California on private and state forestlands. Forest roads can degrade water quality and harm aquatic life when runoff mobilizes fine sediments from the road...
Irrigated agriculture accounts for 90 percent of consumptive use of freshwater in the western US and is considered the largest contributor to nonpoint source water pollution. The diffuse nature of most water quality and quantity challenges necessitates institutions that can more effectively engage agricultural producers in strategic, integrated, watershed-scale approaches...
This research sought to explore the implications of different tenure regimes for both
landscape-level ecological processes and the overall resilience of a social-ecological
system in Central Oregon. The purchase by an investor of former industrial timberlands
known as the Bull Springs tract raised the specter of dispersed residential development on...
The U.S. Forest Service on the Willamette National Forest currently employs the “Disturbed Water Erosion Prediction Project” (WEPP) model to determine potential suspended sediment delivery from timber harvests or other treatment scenarios given user-defined hillslope parameters. At the time of this study there was no known calibration or testing of...