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> River Basin Characterization
River basin characterization is a way to model the relative changes to key basin processes caused by development. These processes include the movement of water, sediment, large wood debris, nutrients, toxicants, and heat through the basin. Together, these processes interact to create and maintain landscape patterns that result in the structure and function of a site. Changes to these processes are a major cause of ecosystem degradation. The goal of river basin characterization is to describe how and where these processes have been altered by human activity over the last hundred years and, based on growth predictions, how and where they will be altered from now to around 2020.
River basin characterization is not intended to compete with or replace the various watershed characterization methods that are currently in use. These existing methods generally focus on a much smaller geographic area and use more localized data to develop site specific recommendations. In contrast, river basin characterization can help prioritize where to conduct these finer scale assessments and provide the context within which to interpret their results. More importantly, it can be used to illuminate those restoration and recovery activities that operate in conjunction with basin processes and thus have the greatest potential for success.
Though millions of dollars have been spent addressing problems of declining salmon, degraded water quality, increased flooding, and reduced stream base flows, there is substantial evidence that, as a whole, past management efforts have been ineffective. The majority of existing policies and traditional techniques focus on structural solutions and fail to address the root biological and physical causes of these problems, i.e. core processes. This lack of success with structure-based recovery efforts is the incentive to search for a way to identify the core process problems. River basin characterization may provide this approach.
An interdisciplinary technical team was finalized in September of 1998 to develop a set of methods for river basin characterization. The Snohomish River Basin, a 5000 square kilometer basin in western Washington, was the pilot application of these methods in which the relative change to key basin processes was evaluated among the basin’s 62 sub-basins.
Team members were:
Kevin Bauersfeld – fisheries biologist
Randy Coots/Steve Butkus – water quality specialist
Cygnia Feeeland – geomorphologist
Susan Grigsby – GIS analyst
Jerry Franklin – GIS technician
Individual members developed a river-basin model for their speciality, then the results were synthesized to produce a set of recommendations for approaching basin-wide restoration efforts.
For additional information contact: Susan Grigsby (360)407-7546