WATERSHED ANALYSIS AS A FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT1

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Abstract
Implementing ecosystem approaches to land use decision making and land management requires new methods for linking science and planning. Greater integration is crucial because under ecosystem management sustainable levels of resource use are determined by coupling management objectives to landscape capabilities and capacities. Recent proposals for implementing ecosystem management employ analyses organized at a hierarchy of scales for analysis and planning. Within this hierarchy, watershed analysis provides a framework for delineating the spatial distribution and linkages between physical processes and biological communities in an appropriate physical context: the watershed. Several such methods are currently in use in the western United States, and although there is no universal procedure for either implementing watershed analysis or linking the results to planning, there are a number of essential elements. A series of questions on landscape‐level ecological processes, history condition, and response potential guide watershed analysis. Individual analysis modules are structured around answering these questions through a spatially‐distributed, process‐based approach. The planning framework linked to watershed analysis uses this information to either manage environmental impacts or to identify desired conditions and develop land management prescriptions to achieve these conditions. Watershed analysis offers a number of distinct advantages over contemporary environmental analyses for designing land management scenarios compatible with balancing environmental and economic objectives.