APPROACH

Team Structure

Our 40-member project team has been organized into four working groups that represent a functional and/ or geographic division of effort:

• The Estuary Working Group is focusing on indicator development in the downstream portions of coastal ecosystems, including deepwater areas, vegetated and unvegetated shallows, tidal marshes and creeks, and adjacent terrestrial habitats.
• The Watershed Working Group is developing indicators for the upstream portions of coastal ecosystems that provide inputs to estuaries and bays, including stream or river reaches, adjacent riparian corridors, associated wetlands and waterbodies, and the contributing drainage basins.
• The Human Dimensions Working Group focuses on cross-cutting socioeconomic issues, including the value and use of indicator information by government officials, and the relationships between environmental and socioeconomic indicators at multiple scales.
• The GIS Team is supporting the above three working groups, and will provide the critically important applications of spatial linkages.

In addition, though not organized as a formal working group, selected members of the project team are focusing on the critical issue of integration - of upstream watersheds with downstream estuaries, integration across scales, and across components of the aquatic system (stream channel, riparian vegetation, and adjacent wetlands).

Selection of Study Units

One of our first steps was to define an appropriate and relevant unit of assessment and management that is applicable to palustrine, lacustrine, riverine, and estuarine systems alike. Such a unit within a coastal system can be denoted as an estuarine segment, composed of deepwater areas, vegetated and unvegetated shallows, tidal marshes and creeks, and the adjacent terrestrial habitats. An equivalent unit upstream of estuaries is a small watershed (14-digit HUC). These areas are typically sized as tens to hundreds of km2, and encompass several stream or river reaches, adjacent riparian corridors, associated wetlands and waterbodies, and the contributing drainage basin. Conversations with decision-makers have indicated that management activities for aquatic ecosystems can be effectively targeted and reported for units of this scale. Thus, there would be a convergence of scale for both assessment and management, for ecological and socioeconomic indicators.

Overview