Adapting Monitoring to Management: a Real World Example from the Elwha River WA

While prudent management adapts based on monitoring results, monitoring is often a low priority for managers due to funding, legal and organizational constraints. Therefore, to extract useful information from management actions, it is often necessary to adapt around the plans of the managers while constrained by limited monitoring resources.  We use the scheduled 2011 removal of the Elwha River dams in Western Washington to illustrate how monitoring can be adapted to take advantage of  these valuable management experiments while having little say in how the management actions will occur. Specific challenges in the Elwha include, a removal date that has continually shifted further into the future, restricted access to parts of the watershed due to logistical constraints, the conundrum of allowance of natural recolonization v. outplanting salmonids into newly opened habitats, a steadily increasing number of monitoring efforts from multiple groups, little pre-project data for several important species, and a constantly changing and uncertain funding environment. We have gradually adapted our pre dam removal monitoring based on resources, a constantly developing knowledge of the system, and most importantly collaborations with new partners. Sampling intensity was reduced to conserve resources as the dam removal date was pushed into the future, protocols were adapted as we gained experience working in the system, and priorities were shifted to better complement new monitoring efforts as they were added. In addition, large river systems such as the Elwha are highly dynamic and heterogeneous which strain traditional monitoring approaches. When combined with the complex sociology of management implementation of a large project like the removal of the Elwha River dams, the ability to adapt is essential.