Symposium Summary: Intensively Monitored Watersheds (IMW): Lessons from the Past and Future Guidance

The IMW symposium was an excellent session with 19 presentations on watershed-scale, habitat restoration effectiveness monitoring projects from throughout the Pacific Northwest and northern California. Study designs varied, with nearly all including a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design at smaller spatial scales but less than half employing a BACI design at a watershed scale or for fish populations. They varied in the amount of pre-project data available with several having over a decade of pre-restoration fish data, many having more than three years, while some had little or no pre-restoration data. Restoration techniques included large wood placement, boulder placement, building instream structures, beaver enhancement via instream posts, barrier removal, and restoring instream flows—with large wood placement being the most common. Many of the IMWs are facing similar challenges including imperfect study design, management of large, complex datasets, and coordination of monitoring activities with restoration projects. The last was common where restoration was largely done on private lands. Recommendations from the symposium include: assuring adequate funding is available for both monitoring and restoration, reducing the scope of some IMWs to focus resources better, and assuring that monitoring and sampling design will allow detection of both reach and watershed scale effects.   — William Ehinger, Washington Department of Ecology, [email protected] Read the symposium abstracts here.