Rebekah Downard

Developing Adaptive Capacity to Droughts: The Rationality of Locality

The Bear River is driven by a highly variable, snow-driven montane ecosystem and flows through a drought- prone arid region of the western United States. It traverses three states, is diverted to store water in an ecologically unique natural lake, Bear Lake, and empties into the Great Salt Lake at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge (BRMBR). People in the Bear River Basin have come to anticipate droughts, building a legal, institutional, and engineered infrastructure to adapt to the watersheds hydrologic realities and historical legacies. Their ways of understanding linked vulnerabilities has led to what might appear as paradoxical outcomes: farmers with the most legally secure water rights are the most vulnerable to severe drought; managers at the federal Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge engage in wetland farming and make unlikely political alliances; and, increased agricultural irrigation efficiency in the Bear River Basin actually threatens the water supply of some wetlands. The rationality of locality is the key to understanding how people in the Bear River Basin have increased their adaptive capacity to droughts by recognizing their interdependencies. As the effects of climate change unfold, understanding social-ecological system linkages will be important for guiding future adaptations and enhancing resilience in ways that appropriately integrate localized ecosystem capacity and human needs.

Keeping wetlands wet in the western United States: adaptations to drought in agriculture-dominated human-natural systems.

Water is critical to protecting wetlands in arid regions, especially in agriculture-dominated watersheds. This comparative case study analyzes three federal wildlife refuges in the Bear River Basin of the U.S. West where refuge managers secured water supplies by adapting to their local environmental context and their refuges relationship to agriculture in being either irrigation-dependent, reservoir-adjacent or diked-delta wetlands. We found that each refuges position confers different opportunities for securing a water supply and entails unique management challenges linked to agricultural water uses. Acquiring contextually-appropriate water rights portfolios was important for protecting these arid region wetlands and was accomplished through various strategies. Once acquired, water is managed to buffer wetlands against fluctuations caused by a dynamic climate and agricultural demands, especially during droughts. Management plans are responsive to needs of neighboring water users and values of the public at large. Such context-specific adaptations will be critical as the West faces climate change and population growth that threaten wetlands and agricultural systems to which they are linked.

Adaptive Wetland Management in an Uncertain and Changing Arid Environment

Wetlands in the arid western United States provide rare and critical migratory bird habitat and constitute a critical nexus within larger social-ecological systems (SES) where multiple changing land-use and water-use patterns meet. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah, USA, presents a case study of the ways that wetland managers have created adaptive management strategies that are responsive to the social and hydrological conditions of the agriculture-dominated SES within which they are located. Managers have acquired water rights and constructed infrastructure while cultivating collaborative relationships with other water users to increase the adaptive capacity of the region and decrease conflict. Historically, water management involved diversion and impoundment of water within wetland units timed around patterns of agricultural water needs. In the last 20 years, managers have learned from flood and drought events and developed a long-term adaptive management plan that specifies alternative management actions managers can choose each year based on habitat needs and projected water supply. Each alternative includes habitat goals and target wetland water depth. However, wetland management adapted to agricultural return-flow availability may prove insufficient as population growth and climate change alter patterns of land and water use. Future management will likely depend more on negotiation, collaboration, and learning from social developments within the SES than strictly focusing on water management within refuge boundaries. To face this problem, managers have worked to be included in negotiations with regional water users, a strategy that may prove instructive for other wetland managers in agriculture-dominated watersheds.