The project addressed this problem:
"Driven by ongoing problems of non-point source pollution and decline of aquatic ecosystems, the 1990's are witnessing a rapid development of place-based watershed planning intitiatives. CWAP now embraces this approach. Nevertheless, these initiatives face numerous obstacles, more social than hydrologic, in achieving improved water quality and aquatic ecosystems. Watersheds do not constitute political jurisdictions; hence resource planning groups face the challenge of acquiriing legitimacy and authority. Nor has a scientific method to integrate policy actions with hydrologic and ecologic outcomes been developed to make accurate assessments of the effects of management options.
It had the following objectives:
(1) to improve our understanding of the opportunities and constraints imposed by the social setting within which local watershed management activities in multiple-owner landscapes operate, and (2) to create a generalizable planning tool focusing on the interactions between policy and actions, land use, and spatially-specific hydrologic and ecologic outcomes.
We used several approaches:
(1) Using the Cache River watershed as a case study, investigate,through focus groups, legal analysis, and other well-developed social scientific methods, the development and operation of "planning groups" that acquire formal and/or informal political legitimacy and legal authority to plan for and implement watershed management measures on behalf of interests within the watershed.
(2) Using GIS-based linked spatial models, create a generalizable framework for predicting the effect of policy changes and economic trends on land use change in watersheds and the effect of these on hydrological and ecological processes within the watershed.
(3) Use models constructed in (2) to assess the probable impact of alternative management actions derived from the planning dyamics identiifed in (1) on the watershed's landscape and its underlying ecological and hydrological processes.
(4) Utilizing representatives from NRCS, IDNR, SWCD, TNC, and other watershed planning initiatives, qualitatively assess the domain in which the products of goals 1-3 are generalizable to watershed problems elsewhere, and the nature of the modifications to those products that would be required to utilize these products in other watersheds.
We expected the following results:
Improvements in risk assessment will occur through: (1) A set of principles that outline the opportunities and constraints facing watershed management, and the socioeconomic variables that determine its success or failure. (2) An enhanced understanding of the roleof technology in watershed decision-making. (3) Generalizable planning procedures for privately owned watersheds.