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Course Overview
Welcome to CSS 573!
We hope you find the readings and activities we will be
completing over the next weeks in "Decision-making and Planning Processes for Watershed
Management" stimulating and rewarding!
The goal of watershed management is to make decisions and take actions that
maintain, restore or enhance a particular landscape – a landscape that includes
aquatic ecosystems -- so that a preferred or desired condition is achieved. From
an ecological viewpoint, the desired condition is one that represents a
particular set of ecological functions and structures. From a societal
stand-point, it is one whereby management is conducted as effectively and
efficiently as possible. Attaining these conditions
likely requires some modification of current or planned land-use activities,
and choices must be made that are directly related to the values humans have
placed on that ecosystem and the organizations managing them.
A premise of this course is that consideration of both ecological and human values, through a process-oriented
approach to watershed analysis and planning, is key to effective decision-making
and sound management decisions.
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Fall,
2008
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| Before you begin this
course, please complete the required course survey by
pressing the
Start Here button
above. |
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Fundamental Issues for
Management include:
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Determining who decides what the
desirable condition for an ecosystem is,
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What that desirable condition for an
ecosystem should be,
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How and when that condition is to be attained, and
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How
ecological, economic, social, and cultural impacts will be considered and
mitigated, where possible.
Natural resource managers are confronted with many
difficult questions that must be addressed in such a process when a watershed
management project is undertaken, such as:
- How does the landscape work? What happened on the watershed before? What are
current conditions and trends? What is the resiliency of the landscape to future
activities and impacts?
- What are the critical issues concerning the landscape?
What are the major concerns, threats, opportunities
relating to those issues?
- What are the possible and desired future conditions of the landscape?
- How should we manage the landscape? What
should our management goals, objectives and activities be to
achieve these conditions, and how do we select these?
- Once we have implemented our management
activities, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of our
management decisions, and how do we act upon those
evaluation results to implement adaptive management in
practice?
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As humans continually develop an improved understanding of how
biological systems function in relation to their environment, we also better
understand how human
activities are affecting those systems. In the 1990s, environmental core values
were broadened to include "sustainable patterns of resource use," reflecting not
only that humans are part of that environment, but also that their impacts on the
environment are in some cases unsustainable. Maintaining, restoring, and in some
cases enhancing ecosystem conditions, especially at a watershed level, involve a complex human system of economic,
socio-cultural and political factors that must be considered if ecosystems are
to be effectively and successfully maintained, enhanced, or restored.
In doing so, natural resource professionals are challenged to determine whether
one condition may be more appropriate than another -- To
what extent is a given
management approach or alternative ecologically sound, economically viable,
and socially and culturally acceptable? Failure to consider all relevant human,
organizational, and political aspects, as well as ecological dimensions, can result in our falling short as managers
in attaining the
ecological restoration goals we set for ourselves.
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Getting Started -- An Overview
The minimum technology requirements are fully explained in the
"Start Here" section at the top of this page. It leads you through a
required survey and a technology test which allows you to make sure
the PC you are using can properly access the course web site
functions.
Blackboard is the course software the University of Idaho
provides for you to submit assignments, engage in threaded
discussions, and view your progress in the course. Within the course
home page, when you see a link to Blackboard, you can just click
on that link to be connected to it. You will be asked for your
user-name and password.
In Blackboard, your user-name is your University username and
password.
That should be pretty simple. However, since some of you are not
regular UI students, you may not be sure what your UI Username is.
Not to worry! In a separate email, I will send you your individual
UI Username if you need it -- just email me if you need me to do
this.
SPEAKING OF EMAIL: It is imperative that you use
the UI vandalmail system for emailing me (www.mail.uidaho.edu),
and your UI email address; this is required of all students taking UI
courses and corresponding on UI "business." When we
first started these online classes, we were looser about this, but it's
proven to be a real problem, & I WILL NOT RESPOND to other email
addresses.
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