River Ecology and Management: Lessons from the Pacific Coastal Ecoregion. Cet article n’est pas disponible.River Ecology and Management: Lessons from the Pacific Coastal Ecoregion

Today, with unprecedented demands on streams and rivers by an exponentially increasing human population, a basic ecological understanding of the structure and dynamics of running waters is essential for formulating sound management and policy decisions. The interface between the science and policy of natural resource management is illustrated by examples from the Pacific coastal ecoregion, including the protection of riparian forest, the marbled murrelet, salmon, and amphibians.

As the vast expanses of natural forests and the great populations of salmonids are harvested to support a rapidly expanding human population, the need to understand streams as ecological systems and to manage them effectively becomes increasingly urgent. The unfortunate legacy of such natural resource exploitation is well documented. For several decades the Pacific coastal ecoregion of North America has served as a natural laboratory for scientific and managerial advancements in stream ecology, and much has been learned about how to better integrate ecological processes and characteristics with a human-dominated environment. These in­ sightful but hard-learned ecological and social lessons are the subject of this book. Integrating land and rivers as interactive components of ecosystems and watersheds has provided the ecological sciences with impor­ tant theoretical foundations. Even though scientific disciplines have begun to integrate land-based processes with streams and rivers, the institutions and processes charged with managing these systems have not done so successfully. As a result, many of the watersheds of the Pacific coastal ecoregion no longer support natural settings for environmental processes or the valuable natural resources those processes create. An important role for scientists, educators, and decision makers is to make the integration between ecology and con­ sumptive uses more widely understood, as well as useful for effective management.