Described here are problems that surfaced during watershed restoration work at Redwood National Park and the Trinity River Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program and offers some possible solutions for similar problems that most likely will arise during any large-scale watershed restoration program within the range of the northern spotted owl.
Potential Problem: Too much money too soon.
Possible Solution: The program should be carried out with a rate of expenditure that follows a bell-shaped curve. The initial rise in rate of expenditure is for gearing up, including developing a scientific, professional and technical team to identify, prioritize and prescribe actual work items, as well as developing the contracting and administrative functions needed to ensure smooth implementation without excessive delays due to bottle-necks at contracting time. Maximum funding must continue at a constant level as long as implementation requires large expenditures for on-the-ground restoration activities. The decreasing rate of expenditure at the end is for continued monitoring and assessment as the program winds down and most on-the-ground work has been completed.
Potential Problem: Too short a time scale for an effective program that addresses long-term ecological restoration.
Watershed restoration throughout the range of the northern spotted owl, from assessment through implementation and monitoring, is at least a 10-year program. Watershed assessments will continue right down to the last years of the program. Even with the Redwood National Park's large budget and professional staff for rehabilitating logged lands, it was almost impossible to get more than one to two years ahead of the implementation work with prepared watershed assessments and erosion control plans. Considerable time and many technically talented professionals are required to assess the watersheds and develop sound plans for restoration work.
Possible Solution: Recognize that a 2 or 3-year shot of restoration funding might not produce tangible results, and has the potential to cause damage as administrative units scramble to spend short-lived funding without adequate time to assess needs and gear up for implementation. The need for a long-term commitment to a restoration program should be acknowledged at the outset.
Potential Problem: Launching a riparian silviculture program without provisions to grow appropriate native plant stock.
Two to three years are required to secure reliable supplies of native, adapted revegetation plant materials for restoration work. Many past restoration programs had a short planning horizon and did not or could not anticipate their needs for suitable plant materials. The result was usually to use inappropriate species or genotypes, with potential negative ecological consequences. Ecological restoration cannot be accomplished without locally-adapted native plant materials.
Possible Solution: Establish a program for providing adapted native revegetation stock for restoration work. This involves identification of suitable species, seed collection, and growing. Waiting for full identification of restoration work sites is often infeasible because of the time needed for seed collection and grow-out of the plants. Species, seed zones and numbers of plants will be necessarily somewhat speculative. The alternative is to not have suitable plant materials, or to defer restoration treatments for 2+ years after they are fully designed. It is generally preferable to begin well-thought-out speculative seed collection and growing, and have surplus of less-than-perfect plant materials, than to delay project implementation 2+ years.
Potential Problem: Assigning restoration priorities incorrectly.
The determination of the most ecologically appropriate watersheds to restore is a complex problem. Past funding for restoration has often been spread between administrative units, with little consideration of the needs and benefits. Restoration funding is seem by many as a way to produce jobs in depressed rural communities, and the presence of an economically impacted community take precedence over ecological needs in locating the priority watersheds.
Possible Solution: Assemble a regional interagency restoration advisory team to devise a system to assign priorities for restoration. This team can act as a clearinghouse for the status of restoration planning, restoration needs, and ecological priorities, and assist in deciding where funding priorities should be.
Potential Problem: Funding tied to federal fiscal year calendar constraints including restrictions on fourth-quarter spending.
Implementing work using heavy equipment for erosion prevention, road upgrading and road decommissioning can be performed only from about May through October in most areas within the range of the northern spotted owl. The best months to work are often July through October. The funding cutoff at the end of the federal fiscal year can be a substantial burden to efficient restoration work. If restoration projects within the range of the northern spotted owl get behind schedule because of restricted use of equipment because of fire weather, unusually wet summer weather, or protection requirements for species such as the marbled murrelet, some flexibility to carry funds over to the next fiscal year will be needed to ensure funds dedicated to specific restoration projects can be used on those projects and not have to be returned to the treasury.
Possible Solution: Funding of restoration programs will need the flexibility to carry funds over to the next fiscal year. This would probably need to be allowed by legislation. Restrictions on fourth-quarter spending might have to be waived for watershed restoration work.
Potential Problem: Work programs and projects that are too large for small, local contractors to competitively bid. Many restoration projects will be too large for small, local contractors to bid competitively.
Possible Solution: This problem can be solved by keeping most projects small enough to allow competitive bids by small, local contractors. Contracts less than $100,000 to $150,000 would be best, and a significant number less than $100,000 would be needed to keep local workers employed. The larger the contacts, the more likely outside, large contractors will be able to outbid the smaller contractors. Some projects will necessarily be large and may require larger contractors so the option of using larger contractors must be kept open.
Potential Problem: Lack of appropriate experience and technical training for equipment operators involved in road decommissioning, erosion prevention, and habitat improvement projects. A skilled equipment operator is invaluable. Good operators quickly learn what the desired end product is and how to achieve it with a minimum amount of supervision or inspection. Unskilled operators can do more damage than good if they are unsupervised for even a few hours.
Possible Solution: Develop training programs for new operators and new projects or techniques. The Redwood National Park experience showed that new operators who were good at road building required considerable explanation on how to remove a culvert, stream crossing, or sidecast material. These new operators came to a much quicker understanding if they were shown a video and slides that illustrated the end product.
Also important is having operators and contractors fully understand why each project is being done so that they can understand what they are doing and why it's important. They are more likely to take pride in their work if they feel they are an important component of the project.
Finally, new operators should be started out on the simpler, more straightforward projects and slowly work into more difficult jobs. Using this technique at Redwood National Park resulted in contractors finding the work challenging and working hard to devise the best way of doing each restoration task.
Potential Problem: Too rapid a time line for on-the-ground project implementation after sufficient project planning and layout. Numerous projects cannot be implemented without prior adequate assessment and planning. The factor limiting implementation and creating blue-collar jobs will be the rate at which watersheds can be properly assessed and prescriptions developed for actual implementation.
Possible Solution: Considerable money and effort will be saved by not attempting to implement more restoration work than has been technically prescribed by trained interdisciplinary teams of professionals.
Compared to the numbers of equipment operators and laborers, there are few technically competent professionals who can be assembled to conduct Watershed Analysis and develop feasible, sound plans and prescriptions for restoration. In other words, the large, existing (and perhaps largely unemployed) labor and equipment force available to perform restoration work must not dictate the rate of implementing restoration work. This rate must be limited by the rate of assessing watersheds and planning projects.
Finally, the professional's time should not always be devoted to identifying problems and developing prescriptions. Redwood National Park always found it advantageous in terms of a more effective and cost-effective product for the professional who mapped, identified and described the problems and proposed solutions at a particular restoration site to actually be involved (lead) in preparing and implementing the on-the-ground restoration work. Otherwise, the work often did not get done the way it was intended, and restoration objectives were only partially met.
Potential Problem: Untrained technical coordinators, planners, and supervisors of on-the-ground restoration activities. Technically competent professionals are needed at nearly every step of restoration from Watershed Analysis to final on-the-ground implementation of restoration projects. For tasks like road decommissioning, an untrained supervisor can quickly cut off access to areas that may not have been properly treated. It is then very difficult and expensive to go back and correct the flawed work.
Possible Solution: When heavy equipment is used in watershed restoration, a technically trained professional must visit each work site several times each day, unless equipment operators are very skilled and experienced. Some outstanding operators who have considerable experience in a particular type of restoration work can be left unsupervised with little risk. On the other hand, an inexperienced operator must be watched and directed carefully (and almost continually) by a technically trained and experienced contracting officer until that operator has mastered the various tasks of restoration. Develop training programs for contractors, equipment operators, and supervisors. Provide supervision commensurate with the experience and reliability of equipment operators. Start new operators on simple projects, and move them to increasingly more difficult projects as they acquire skills and gain experience.
Potential Problem: Lack of adequate funding for project documentation, evaluation and monitoring. One of the benefits of restoration is to learn how to be effective and inform future program and projects. Without adequate documentation and monitoring, which is common, this benefit is not realized. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of all project work must be documented, monitored and evaluated to ensure highest possible performance and lowest possible costs.
Possible Solution: Restoration planning must ensure that funding be allocated for documenting, evaluating, and monitoring restoration projects and that a formal evaluation and monitoring program be established and carried out. Unit work times and costs must be carefully documented. Restoration work must also be monitored over time for its effectiveness in accomplishing the stated or desired restoration goals. A sample of tasks will have to be monitored for a number of years to identify project benefits.
Potential Problem: Lack of a formal mechanism for feed-back of monitoring and evaluation data into improved restoration practices. There must be a mechanism for the results of monitoring and cost evaluations to feed back into the restoration work in order to improve effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.
Possible Solution: Establish a monitoring group separate from the restoration group. This will facilitate extending findings at one site to all other appropriate locations. Some practices applicable and advantageous in one region may not be applicable in another region, but that can best be decided by the monitoring team. This technical monitoring team should be relatively independent of the implementation teams, but must spend enough time on the ground and at work sites to understand how restoration work is performed.
Potential Problem: Lack of professional peer review at multiple stages of project planning and implementation, resulting in inefficient and/or ineffective restoration work.
At Redwood National Park, no matter how well trained, competent, and experienced were the professionals preparing the restoration plan for an area or sub-basin, a field review of proposed work by similarly trained peers was exceptionally useful in improving each restoration project.
Possible Solution: Establish a formal system for obtaining peer review of proposed restoration projects. Ensure that a member of the monitoring group review proposed projects.
Potential Problem: Lack of technically sound criteria for determining the cost-effectiveness of proposed projects, and for ranking proposed treatments in a watershed.
Possible Solution: For each type of restoration treatment, a team of restoration experts should establish guidelines for the evaluation of proposed programs and projects. These might need to be adapted to local situations, done within a consistent context for evaluation.
Potential Problem: Difficulty of obtaining professional staff with appropriate scientific training and field experience needed to plan and prescribe suitable restoration actions.
Restoration ecology is a newly developing field of practice. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) does not have specific job classifications for most professional and technical positions. OPM lists of applicants for erosion and sediment control rarely identify suitable professionals with relevant training or experience. For example, lists of geologists typically yield hardrock mining experts, petroleum geologists, or other professionals who were trained in "classical geology", but not in erosion and sediment control. For riparian silviculture, land management agencies employ foresters who have training and usually experience in silviculture, but it is most commonly focused on commercial timber species and techniques for maximizing the production of wood. The knowledge and skills needed for riparian silviculture are quite different.
Possible Solution: Field geomorphologists with training in hydrology or other personnel with skills and experience in forest geomorphology are best suited for sediment-related restoration work. Propose a new OPM job classification of "geomorphologist". This is the most appropriate discipline.
Establish an education program to enable silviculturists to learn about riparian ecology and adapt their skills to riparian systems.
Potential Problem: Insufficient communication and reporting of results and methods. Communicating ideas, findings, procedures and techniques of watershed and fisheries restoration techniques and successes is essential for efficient restoration. It is important to report not just accomplishments, but also practical suggestions on how to improve restoration work, restoration techniques and costs, and results of restoration monitoring.
Possible Solution: Establish a system of reporting that encourages communication among groups engaged in planning and implementing watershed restoration. The system can have a more formal component for rigorous reporting by the monitoring group and a more informal system for field professionals to discuss their work in a format that is easily obtained by everyone doing similar projects in other forests. Restoration notes, electronic mail, and automated FAX networks could serve this purpose, while the monitoring group could report more detailed findings, conclusions and recommendations in a technical report series.
It is also important at the onset of the program to assemble all current information available on restoration techniques that are applicable to steep, forested areas and to the problems to be treated, and to present this information in interactive training sessions where attendance is required of those who will be performing project layout and overseeing implementation in the field. These could be taped for presentation to newly hired staff as they come on-board. This will ensure that everyone, everywhere, begins the restoration program with at least a common base of information and knowledge.
Potential Problem: Contracting may be too costly and too inflexible for implementing restoration plans efficiently. Redwood National Park found contracting was more costly, required much more preparation time, and less flexible than simply hiring and supervising equipment with operators to perform the same tasks.
Direct equipment rental with operators selected by hourly rate bids was usually preferred by the technical staff preparing prescriptions and supervising restoration work on the ground. The same was true for decommissioning unused roads in the Trinity River watershed in northern California and in northwest Washington (Harr and Nichols 1993).
Contracting often requires many months of lead time before implementation of restoration can begin. The contracting procedure should be streamlined as much as possible to prevent unnecessary delays in implementation. There is a fairly narrow window for implementing many types of restoration work involving earth moving, work in stream channels, and on unsurfaced roads, so it is essential that contracting not preclude using this narrow window.
Possible Solution: The contracting process could be streamlined to reduce required lead times. It would be preferable to have a contracting staff specifically dedicated to restoration contracting at the various administrative levels of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in order to keep this work separate from the normal flow of other projects that are contracted by each administrative unit. This may help streamline operations and reduce the time from project identification to project implementation. It would also be helpful if equipment rental agreements (where work is completed by hourly reimbursement) could be employed in restoration work involving earth moving such as decommissioning roads and upgrading culverts and stream crossings.
Potential Problem: Lack of a defined life span of the restoration program.
Possible Solution: Make a concerted effort to define the expected life expectancy of a watershed restoration program. The option of extending or shortening the program should be based on measured successes and failures at accomplishing program goals and objectives, not on perpetuating a program based solely on the fact that it exists. Honest determinations must be made as to when or if program goals have or can be met.
Given the Pacific Northwest-wide scale of the envisioned program, we may find there is only so much that can be done to encourage recovery in many watersheds. In these basins, we must have the maximum physical and biological returns for the funds expended. In other watersheds, the extent of the watershed and biological risks will be much greater, and require many more years to accomplish program goals and objectives. The point is, do not institutionalize the program, but instead constantly monitor and evaluate the net worth of the program based on attainable, cost-effective watershed and biological needs.
