WA means "perfect harmony" in Japanese. Of course for forest land managers in the northwest, WA means, "watershed analysis." Our goal as watershed scientists is to bring these two together.

Watershed analysis makes sense. Developing the art and science of WA is, I believe, the Big Door to better watershed management, to genuine ecosystem management, and to effective long-term conservation of soil, water, air, and biodiversity. Few accomplishments worth remembering come easy.

Watershed policy futurists say with confidence that WA is an irresistible concept and will spread from the northwest all over the country. So the heat is on us westerners to show that this can really lead somewhere-that it is doable and useful. Washington State got things started with a watershed analysis process related to forest practices on private lands, focusing on cumulative effects and fish. The feds took this cue and launched a more comprehensive approach that constitutes ecosystem analysis at the scale of a watershed. There's a WA revolution underway.

You're standing on a gravel bar, next to a beautiful river. Watershed analysis has revealed which floods put the gravel bar there, why the vegetation on it looks the way it does, and which birds and salamanders spend lots of time on such bars. You now know that the half-buried tree there had to come from at least 10 miles away based on its species, that the type and age of the forest on the adjacent hillside above the river gorge has high fire hazards and will most likely burn before becoming old growth. Through WA, you know that whitewater rafters use these bars to camp on and there are occasional sanitation problems, that the side channel behind you is a high flow refuge for young salmon, and that the next really big rainstorm will bring lots more sediment and debris, especially from the heavily roaded area in the upper end of the watershed where some catastrophic erosional events are waiting to happen, unless they are prevented, and here's how.

Watershed analysis is based on places and processes rather than on projects, in distinction to NEPA analyses. Most analyses we've done in the past were responding to a proposed project; so the proposal was at the center while the place and why it mattered was ancillary. Conflicts and advocacy were the norm, group learning and real collaboration seldom occurred. Now we have the chance to step back, look at an entire watershed, and find out what we know about it; all disciplines looking at the same place at the same time.

The concept of watershed analysis and why it could be so useful often does not come clear after one meeting or reading. An investment must be made in thinking about the utility of WA and how to go about doing it. Amazingly, everyone who spends the time and energy thinking about it for awhile gets it-the same basic concept. It's a pleasure to see this light go on for people. It's the beginning of group learning, and it sets the stage for some very exciting connections.

In doing WA, we find that the most interesting and informative discoveries are in the connections between resource elements that have separate practitioners, separate disciplines. The links between fish habitat and hillslope geomorphology are pretty obvious, though we're only just now getting good at working together to define them. Less obvious but just as important are the relationships between things like the watershed cultural history and the conditions of the vegetation and streams; or the wildlife habitats and fire hazard distribution in a watershed. We're finding that some connections are real paydirt, and WA is a good vehicle for bringing people together to discover them. Along the way we reveal our uncertainties and the things we don't know, but believe we should. We teach each other what we do know and learn to learn together. Big pictures take shape that are novel, advance our understanding of whole systems, and couldn't have been drawn by any of our past methods. Intensive, place-based, collaborative analysis is new to most scientists and specialists. Our specialties are useful of course, but the time has come to merge all of our specialized chapters and paragraphs into the whole story if we are to understand ecosystems. Harmony is a good word for all this; striving for perfect harmony is a worthy ideal for human beings.