HR: 10:20h
AN: H52A-01    [Abstracts]
TI: The Restoration Response Function as an Organizing Tool for Evaluating Success of River Management Programs
AU: * Schmidt, J C
EM: jack.schmidt@usu.edu
AF: Department of Aquatic, Watershed, and Earth Resources, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-5210
AB: The national effort to reverse undesired environmental conditions on regulated rivers involves substantial societal costs that inevitably force prioritization of reaches for rehabilitation and of restoration techniques. Societal costs are associated with transformation of the flow and sediment transport regime, physical manipulation of the channel and floodplain, administrative costs of river management agencies, research costs, costs of new technology such as temperature control or sediment by-pass, and costs of reduced hydropower production. One strategy for assessing costs and assigning priorities is to assemble data about restoration program success and failure within some organizing framework. The restoration response function is one such organizing framework. This function defines the relationship between the costs of flow and sediment alteration and the results of those actions in reversing undesired river conditions. Development of these functional relations should be an essential element in a national assessment of stream restoration programs. Numerous river management programs in the Colorado River basin provide an opportunity to compare restoration response functions and identify those river segments where greater environmental gains are afforded by smaller societal costs. Restoration response functions differ significantly in conditions of sediment deficit, such as downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, and in conditions of sediment surplus, such as exist throughout much of the Green River in Utah. In conditions of severe sediment deficit, large costs are sustained without significant results. Greater benefits in reversing undesired environmental conditions are possible for smaller costs in conditions of sediment surplus. Thus, the effort to rehabilitate and restore aggrading segments of the Colorado River in the Upper Basin are relatively efficient economically while the costs of similar efforts in the Grand Canyon are relatively inefficient.
DE: 6304 Benefit-cost analysis
DE: 1824 Geomorphology (1625)
DE: 1857 Reservoirs (surface)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting