Biological assessment in watershed management decision making: The link between monitoring and restoration

Effective watershed management is a combination of restoration and protection. Using a management framework based on biological response to stressors, restoration can be defined as the reduction, control, or elimination of stressors and the sources that produce them; protection is the prevention of new stressor sources from becoming established in the watershed. Biological monitoring, using appropriately-calibrated indicators of known quality (such as fish and benthic macroinvertebrate indexes of biological integrity) and from an objective site network, provides the most direct and accurate approach for assessing watershed conditions for ecological health. Stressor indicators are used to help explain causes of degraded biological indicators, and stressor sources information, associated with different kinds of land use and land cover activities, from urban to agricultural to relatively natural help target restoration or remediation activities. Different spatial and temporal scales for monitoring are necessary for evaluating the effectiveness of 1) stressor control strategies and 2) overall watershed management. Thus, effective decision-making is adaptive, driven by information provided by biological condition indicators, and focused on stressor source elimination or mediation. Case examples are described for these different aspects of adaptive watershed management using the Upper Etowah River and Bennett Creek watersheds in Georgia and Maryland, respectively.