Trinity River Restoration Program: Data Use and Sharing for Adaptive Management in a Multi-Agency Program

The Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) is a multi-agency effort to restore ecosystem function to a river impaired by mining and flow diversion. The Program includes Federal, State, Local, and Tribal government agencies working together to restore and monitor the river through adaptive management. Management tools include dam release hydrographs, site rehabilitation through large-scale channel and floodplain manipulations, fine sediment control, and coarse sediment augmentation. Rehabilitation sites are currently constructed every year, driving a need for efficient data use to improve site designs. Numerous monitoring projects and integrative scientific studies could benefit from data exchange between individual projects. Yet agency boundaries, past inter-agency conflicts, and individual personalities can complicate efficient sharing of data and threaten the functionality of adaptive management. TRRP has a long way to go, but is beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. Drivers of this improvement appear to include: (1) a paradigm shift in thinking of the TRRP as one program rather than a group of agencies connected only on paper, (2) improved communications of what is needed to achieve adaptive management, (3) recognition of the value of another’s data, and (4) continual progression in technical options for pooling data - particularly in making it easy to contribute amidst busy staff schedules.