Recovering Sturgeon with Less Water: Lessons Learned from the Tri-State Water War

Water management and increased consumption has been the subject of controversy since the late 1980’s in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin (AL/GA/FL).  Compacts and other negotiations for equitable allocation of water have all failed.  In 2006, the State of Florida sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) for alleged failure to comply with the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in its operations of ACF reservoirs.  In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assisted the Corps in developing and revising an interim operating plan (IOP) for the releases from the final dam in the basin.  The IOP was designed to avoid and minimize impacts to ESA-protected species and their habitats including the Gulf sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi) and three freshwater mussels.  The IOP does not establish specific environmental flows but prescribes river fall rates and the degree to which releases from Woodruff Dam may vary from basin inflows using flow thresholds taken from habitat requirements of the protected species.  We summarize the analysis of effects of the IOP on ESA-protected species and discuss its role in the broader context of environmental flows for the basin.  We also discuss implications for anadromous sturgeon recovery in altered systems with increasing water consumption.