Assessing the Impacts of Restoration Efforts on Water and Natural Systems in a Changing World

Resource managers must balance the impacts of competing management decisions on multiple, interacting natural systems. Hydrologic and ecological processes, such as groundwater fluctuations and riparian evapotranspiration, can be tightly coupled. Ideally, managers would have tools and models that include all processes to better understand how each management action would propagate through the environment. Because resources are limited, management tools that include only the most important processes may be more realistic. However, in some cases, omitting some interactions can lead to significant errors in predictions of hydrologic outcomes and ecological function, severely limiting a manager’s ability to identify how restoration and conservation actions may make a system more resilient. Our goal is to develop a metric of hydrologic feedback strength for weighing the impact of conservation and restoration actions. We use modeling and feedbacks to quantify how hydrologic processes or restoration can amplify or absorb the effects of climate variability on riparian systems. Our framework also allows scientists to assess which processes are critical for hydrologic models to predict response to climate change. Using these index values, managers can predict which processes will amplify or absorb the potential effects of variable climate, climatic change, and proposed restoration actions.