 I'm David Hulse, professor in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon. Here to talk with you today about an approach to planning and anticipating the design and management of the land, particularly with focus on managed landscapes, agriculturally dominated managed landscapes. The title of this talk is Designing Alternative Futures for Managed Landscapes. What is an alternative futures project? Simply put, it's a type of impact or risk assessment where two or more alternatives are considered. And importantly, the alternatives are represented spatially. They're mapped in quite precise ways. One or more things that people care about are evaluated for the effects that these alternative futures would have. Examples of these kinds of endpoints are things like the dollar value of commodity production, the effects on terrestrial or aquatic wildlife, the amounts and distribution of water use is another example. And finally, the alternative futures are compared and contrasted for the effects they have on these things people care about. What I'd like to do is spend a few moments with you using two different case studies from two different parts of the country, illustrating how this alternative futures approach works. The basic gist of the idea is that in mapped form, one gains some understanding of how a study area of interest existed in the past, at some point in the past. And the image that you're going to see now, the date is the mid-19th century, important in this particular example because that predates most Euro-American alteration of the landscape. With that understanding of how the land was in the past, a fair amount of effort is put into mapping how it is today in the present. This understanding of the trajectory of change of how we got from conditions in the past to conditions in the present is then used to define a set of assumptions about how the future will unfold. Again, in the image that you're looking at, there are three different paths to the future that are illustrated. One with an emphasis on ecological function here called the conservation 2050 scenario, where the date of 2050 is the period of time into the future that's being considered. A second, the planned trend 2050 scenario, where the assumption is that policies and practices from the present continue largely unchanged into the future. And the planned trend scenario represents conditions on the ground under that set of assumptions. The third alternative here illustrated assumes that more emphasis will be put on short-term economic gain, the title of this alternative being the development 2050 scenario. This basic approach to thinking about and anticipating the effects of future land and water use called alternative futures approaches fits very comfortably with the predominant approach used by the Natural Resource Conservation Service. The diagram of the Natural Resource Conservation planning approach begins with the same kind of need to understand conditions as they exist at the time the study begins. What here is called pre-planning. Thinking about those conditions on the ground that exist at present. Paying due attention to the concerns of the people whose lives are bound up with the land, those who make their living on and from the land. Building a sense of trust and rapport with those stakeholder groups. And particularly important building a group of interdisciplinary team members whose areas of expertise fit the nature of the land and the processes both natural and cultural that go on in the study area in question. With that prior planning done, the NRCS planning approach then outlines a series of steps that begin with delineating geographically defined study area. Often a watershed, sometimes a county, some geographically bounded area of interest and developing a vision for what the conservation goals for that geographically bounded area are. What are the processes and resources that are of significant importance to merit, conserving and protecting over time? The next step then being to inventory important resources in that study area and mapping them. Analyzing those resource data. Developing a set of alternatives for how the land and water resources in that study area will be used and managed over time. Having a specific set of evaluation criteria, here including compliance with stated goals and objectives, compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, compatibility with watershed resources and compatibility with local values. Obviously all very important issues, not only to the NRCS but to any wise and thoughtful planning of land and water uses in an area. The next steps then consisting of selecting a preferred plan, implementing it and then iteratively evaluating the effectiveness of that plan and revising the plans for the future based on that understanding of effectiveness. The point that I wanna make here is this NRCS planning approach is really highly compatible with the alternative futures approach but there are a few key differences and I'd like to direct your attention to those. Here listed as a set of four components are some key steps along the way in implementing an alternative futures approach to planning and management of land, particularly for conservation purposes. The first of these components has to do with preparing the future scenarios. There are two key ways in which people who have conducted alternative futures projects have prepared future scenarios. One relies on expert driven assumptions of scenarios where people who have defined expertise about the resources in question are the people that one looks to help define how the future will unfold. A second and not necessarily incompatible approach to preparation of the future scenarios is an approach in which the citizen stakeholders themselves define the assumptions that lead to the definition of the alternative futures. In the two case studies that I'll show you briefly in a few moments, in one an expert driven approach to defining the future scenarios is used and in the second a citizen driven approach is used. The second component of alternative future projects has to do with the choice and preparation of evaluation models. What is it that people believe are important enough about the natural and cultural processes in a study area to be used to evaluate, to compare and contrast the differences among the alternative futures. Again, prototypical examples of evaluation models have to do with the dollar value of conservation and commodity resources with the effects on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity and particularly of importance in the western United States with the effects on water use in study areas. The third component of the alternative future projects have to do with the use of these evaluation models to evaluate the alternative futures. And finally, and of particular importance, the dissemination of results. How does one decide who the relevant audience groups are for the dissemination of results and what are the appropriate formats to organize and convey the results to each of those different audiences. I'd now like to step into the first of the two case studies that I want to use to illustrate the various ways in which these alternative futures approaches can be applied and how their various types of application can be well-tuned to the local needs, concerns and landscapes that are being studied. The first case study is titled Modeling Effects of Alternative Landscape Design and Management on Water Quality and Biodiversity in Midwest Agricultural Landscapes. It focuses on an area in central Iowa in the heart of the corn and soybean country. To explain this case study in Iowa, I'd like to first tell you a little bit about the people who were involved and their areas of expertise, to explain the purpose of the project, its context and funding, to talk about the circumstances as they existed on the ground when the project began, how they went about designing the alternative futures for the Iowa project, how they then evaluated the alternative futures and briefly summarize some of the results from those evaluations and conclude the Iowa case study with a few words about the status of that project today. As with most alternative future projects, the Iowa project relied on a multi-disciplinary group of individuals with expertise ranging from animal ecology through geosciences, natural resource management, and resource economics. Project researchers hailed from Iowa State University, from the University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, and Oregon State University. The purpose of the Iowa project was to inform landowners and policy makers of the effects of land use and management choices, particularly of the effects on water quality and biodiversity in agricultural watersheds. As I said, the project context is in the heartland of the Central United States and Central Iowa. An earlier NRCS funded project that went under the acronym of master had developed detailed information sets on a variety of watersheds distributed throughout Iowa. Two of those watersheds, Buck Creek, a little less than 9,000 hectares in size, and Walnut Creek, a little more than 5,000 hectares in size, were chosen for the Alternative Futures Project. As the images show, both of these watersheds are dominated by corn and soybean agriculture. The funding for this project was secured with a grant that jointly sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation. In my experience, the cost of these Alternative Futures projects ranges from somewhere between $750 per square mile of study area to about $1,250 per square mile of study area. In the Iowa project, the comparative small area of the two watersheds that were studied and the comparatively large amount of money actually made this one of the more well-funded Alternative Futures projects. It was about a three-year project in length. As I mentioned before, Alternative Futures projects rely heavily on accurate spatial information, good maps. In the Iowa project, a previous project titled the Midwest Agricultural Surface and Subsurface Transports and Effects Research Project, which had been conducted in the mid-1990s, left a legacy of highly detailed geographic information. These data sets had been developed in the mid-1990s, and they included information on land use and land cover, on soils, and on other important natural and cultural resources in the two watersheds. Of particular significance, and one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Iowa Alternative Futures projects was the very fine spatial grain at which this information existed. The landscape in these study areas was defined at a resolution of three meters by three meters on the ground. This is a much finer grain, much higher resolution information than most of the Alternative Futures projects that have been done to date, as you'll hear more when I talk about the second of the two case studies today. In addition to the detailed spatial grain of the information in the Iowa project, also of high detail was the list of characteristics, both natural and cultural, that were mapped. The image on the screen shows you a list, which in effect was the legend for the land use and land cover maps that described existing conditions in the Iowa project. The list ranges from a detailed description of various types of agricultural crops, including corn and soybeans, alfalfa, pasture, and others, as well as areas of native and natural vegetation, windbreaks, both herbaceous and woody, cultural features such as roads, railroads, riparian vegetation, cemeteries, and so on. With this kind of a mapped information base at their disposal, the project researchers identified a set of important natural and cultural processes that would be taken into account in developing the alternative futures and distinguishing one from the other. These relevant natural and cultural processes included crop type and location. This is one of the things that would vary among the alternatives, which crops were being grown and where. Farming practices, again, what farming practices and where they would be distributed on the ground. Agricultural policy at local, county, state, and particularly national levels were of importance in the Iowa project. The economic implications of the different alternatives, the perception of farmers to the actual conditions on the ground under the different scenarios of the future were important, and the total human population living in the study areas. Another distinguishing characteristic of the Iowa project relative to other alternative futures projects is that the Iowa project actually assumes at most the population in the future will remain constant relative to the present, with two of the three scenarios assuming the number of people will actually decline in the future relative to the present living in the study areas. There were four key natural and cultural processes that were used as evaluative yardsticks in the Iowa case study. One concerned the effects of the different alternatives on water quality in the study areas. A second concerned the effects on terrestrial biodiversity, the creatures that make their living on the land as it's affected by agriculture and other land uses in the study area. A third evaluative yardstick had to do with the perceptual preferences of farmers in the study area for the different appearances of the three scenarios in the Iowa project. And the fourth had to do with the dollar value of commodity production, agricultural commodity production under the three future scenarios articulated in the Iowa project. So with that set of descriptions of the existing conditions, the crop types, the areas of native and natural vegetation, the areas of cultural features mapped at a very detailed resolution, and that set of evaluative concerns, water quality, biodiversity, landscape perception and economics, all clearly agreed upon. Project researchers set about defining a set of assumptions for how the future would unfold in these case study watersheds. Changes were depicted regarding both agricultural and non-agricultural uses of the land. The scale was three meters by three meters, very fine grained, and the time interval between the present and the future was 25 years. This is another distinguishing characteristics of different alternative future projects. In the second of the two case studies that I'll talk about briefly in Western Oregon, 10-year time steps were used to get from the present to the penultimate future depiction. In the Iowa project, that time interval from the present, circa 1995 to the future was leaped in one time step. In the Iowa project, considerations of how these alternatives would be organized and mapped on the ground were influenced by the scale of agricultural equipment that was assumed to be used under the agricultural management practices of each scenario. The size and configuration of the agricultural fields, the suitability of the land for growing corn, and the land capability class. As I mentioned, one of the key variables in preparing and defining the alternative future scenarios has to do with who makes the assumptions about how the future will unfold. In the Iowa case study, the predominant role fell to the project researchers to define those assumptions. Project researchers were led by Joan Nassauer, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan, and she and her fellow team members, along with interested parties from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the NRCS, consulted broadly with local, county, state, and other federal interested parties in defining the assumptions. All of those parties agreed that there would be some common assumptions for each of the three Iowa project alternative futures. First, each of the landscapes would embody profitable agricultural production by private landowners. Second, each of the three scenarios would embody public concerns for water quality to a greater or lesser extent. Third, each of the three scenarios would embody public concerns for biodiversity to a greater or lesser extent. Each landscape would be affected by global markets. Each would be affected by international and national agricultural policy, as well as national, state, and local environmental policy. And agriculture and environmental policy would reflect societal perceptions, values, and concerns. So, in the Iowa project, three alternative futures were created using the information that I've described briefly for you before. And the three scenarios varied in terms of the size of farms, how woodland areas were treated and assumed to be managed over time, the size and location of riparian buffers, the placement of livestock, farming practices, again, the size of the human population in each of the three alternative futures, and the presence and role of visitors in each of the three alternative futures to these landscapes. The specific design process used by Joe Nassauer and the design team who was charged with developing the mapped alternative futures relied on advice not only from the project team, but from a set of interested parties whose concerns ranged from federal agencies to the local landowners in this study areas. The information was necessarily very detailed because of the agricultural use and the very fine grain of certain natural features such as woody riparian and herbaceous riparian zones around low order streams. This necessitated the very fine grain three meter by three meter dataset. And again, the project leapt from the present circa 1995, 25 years into the future in one time step. The alternative futures that were developed in the Iowa project relied on a number of key variables to distinguish one scenario from another. The size and type of corridors, hedgerow corridors, road corridors. The size and type of the agricultural matrix within which those corridors occur. The size and type of agricultural fields. The type and location of the residences within which the people inhabiting the study areas live. And interestingly, in one of the scenarios, a mixing and matching option in which the corridors, matrices, field size types and human population types and locations were mixed and matched. As an aside, a noteworthy resource for use in planning corridors of the kind addressed in the Iowa project is this NRCS document, conservation corridor planning at the landscape level. One of the outcomes of the Iowa project had to do with lessons learned. One of those was that even with this very fine grain three meter by three meter data description of the mapped features on the land, it was still difficult for some of the evaluation models, particularly the terrestrial biodiversity model, to do its job. In many cases, the particular wildlife processes that the researchers were most interested in investigating operated at a scale even finer than the three meter by three meter data were able to capture. Another important lesson is the significance of communication with stakeholders throughout the process, particularly in the stages where the alternative future assumptions are being defined. Some of the most surprising findings from the Iowa project had to do with the ways in which those scenarios that focused most on incorporating conservation goals, conservation of water quality and biodiversity produced big changes in the landscape. The scenario which put greatest emphasis on protecting and conserving biodiversity turned out to be quite profitable from an economic commodity production perspective. The scenario which put the greatest emphasis on production of corn and soybeans resulted in the greatest loss of any of the scenarios in grassland habitat and the greatest increase in water pollution. In terms of the preferences of farmers to the appearance of the different scenarios, scenario one, which was the scenario which put the greatest emphasis on commodity production, was the least preferred by the farmers. Scenario two, which attempted to achieve a compromise position between the water quality and biodiversity goals and the commodity production was more preferable than scenario one, but less preferable still than scenario three, which was the scenario that put the greatest emphasis on water quality and biodiversity. Scenario three was the most preferred by the farmers of the three future scenarios. And particularly interestingly, the existing landscape was the least preferred. So where is the project today? As you might expect, given the academic credentials of the project investigators, there are a number of written publications which will describe the results and findings and surprises of this project. These publications focus on some of the different dimensions of the project. The design team from the project is going to be writing a book chapter on the cultural acceptance and landscape management components of the project and the findings related to those. The economics team will be publishing an article in the Journal of Ecological Economics. Joe Nassauer, the lead investigator is writing a chapter about how the ecological principles embodied in the more conservation oriented of the alternative futures will be used and the lessons learned from those. And the team that focused on the biodiversity effects of the alternatives is writing an article with their findings for the Agricultural Ecology Journal. The second of the two case studies is from Western Oregon's Willamette River Basin. This is work that was conducted by a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team of researchers called the Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium. It was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It was a five year, 10 million dollar project and it included investigators from the US EPA, Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, and the USDA Forest Service. As with the Iowa project, the Willamette Basin Alternative Futures Project also operated with an understanding of the past, how land use management and alteration has changed past landscapes to the landscapes we know today in the present. Use that understanding of the trajectories of change to work with stakeholder groups to define a set of assumptions about three different alternative futures. Each of those different alternative futures were then evaluated for their effects on terrestrial biodiversity, aquatic biodiversity, the condition of the large river that flows through the study area, the Willamette River, and the socioeconomic implications of how water use will change. By contrast with the Iowa Alternative Futures Project, the Willamette River Basin work put the task of defining the assumptions about how the future will unfold firmly in the hands of citizen stakeholder groups with the research experts basically implementing and mapping those assumptions as defined by the citizen stakeholder groups. As with the Iowa project, the Willamette Basin Alternative Futures Project also had a diverse multidisciplinary set of project researchers. With research expertise varying from land and water ecosystem process to resource economics, to landscape planning, this too was a diverse group of over 35 researchers. The structure of the citizen stakeholder process had two different tiers of stakeholder involvement. The first group was a group that was met with monthly for over two years to define the specific assumptions that I'll explain to you briefly in a moment of each of the Alternative Futures. The work of this group was then aired before larger governor-appointed groups at regular intervals throughout the five-year history of the project to get broader understanding and a broader buy-in to the plausibility of the assumptions of the Willamette Basin Alternative Futures. Also like the Iowa project, one of the key information sets that was developed in the Willamette Basin Alternative Futures was a map that described existing conditions. As is shown in the context map in the upper right-hand corner, the Willamette River Basin is in the western portion of Oregon. The Pacific Ocean is to the west approximately 60 miles. The western boundary of the Willamette River Basin is formed by the coastal range of mountains, relatively low in altitude. The eastern boundary of the Willamette River Basin is formed by the Cascade Mountain range of volcanic origin, significantly higher, over 10,000 feet in many places. The western slope of the Cascades, shown here in various shades of green, is dominated by coniferous forests, very high productivity agricultural soils are in the valley floor, and the major metropolitan area of Portland is at the northern end of the basin, Salem, Oregon State Capitol in the middle, Corvallis on the western edge of the valley floor, and Eugene Springfield at the southern end of the valley floor. The Willamette River itself flows out of headwaters in the Cascades and coast range, flows through the center of the valley floor, through Eugene, past Corvallis, through Salem, and joins with the Columbia River at Portland. A select set of maps from the Willamette River Basin Alternative Futures Project is available in your course notebook. There were three alternative future scenarios developed in the Willamette River Basin Project, and they varied in their focus on what people will give priority to as they make choices about land and water use over the next 50 years. Each of these three alternatives assumes the same total 2050 human population of the basin, a little less than four million people, roughly twice the present population. The planned trend 2050 scenario assumes a status quo carrying forward of today's land and water use management policies over the next 50 years. The development 2050 scenario assumes greater emphasis will be given to short-term economic gain with market forces being more influential in making land and water use decisions. The conservation 2050 scenario puts greater emphasis on long-term ecological function, in some cases at the expense of short-term economic gain. The table on the screen illustrates for several key factors how each of the alternative futures assumptions varies. For example, the planned trend 2050 scenario assumes recent trends and long-term plans for urban densities will continue into the future, achieving by 2050 an average residential density of about eight dwellings per acre throughout the urban areas of the basin by the year 2050. The development scenario, by contrast, assumes that people will build residential areas no more dense than they are today, achieving by 2050 residential densities in the urban areas of the basin of slightly over six dwellings per acre. The conservation scenario, again by contrast, assumes that efforts will be made to keep urban settlements compact for a number of conservation goals, achieving by the year 2050 average residential densities in the urban areas of the basin of approximately nine dwellings per acre. Other comparative variables of particular interest to our purpose today has to do with the amount of agricultural land that is an act of agricultural use in 1990 that by 2050 would be converted to non-agricultural uses. This varies from a low of slightly less than 39,000 acres of ag land conversion for planned trend to more than 100,000 acres of ag land conversion for the development scenario. Not only does the amount of land converted for agricultural use vary under the three alternatives, but the uses to which that former ag land is converted varies as well. In the development scenario, because of the low residential density, much of the more than 100,000 acres of 1990 agricultural land that are converted are converted to urban and rural residential uses. Contrast that with the conservation scenario where a significant amount of agricultural land, 1990 agricultural land, is converted to non-agricultural uses by the year 2050 but the purpose of that 2050 land use is to restore native and natural vegetation, particularly in the riparian dominated areas of the lowlands of the valley floor. If in conducting an alternative futures project, the decision is made to let citizen stakeholder groups play a large role in defining the assumptions of the alternatives. It's important to find ways to help them understand the implications of those assumptions. What I'd like to show you now is a video simulation illustrating a technique that we've found helpful in helping lay citizen stakeholder groups do just that, understand the implications of these assumptions as they play out on the land. The video shows the Willamette River Basin and focuses in on a portion at the southern end of the valley floor, just north of the town of Eugene and Springfield. The main stem Willamette River flows through this study area from south to north and we will follow a flight path simulating a view out the window of a low-flying airplane that begins at the north end of this focus zone, flies around the western edge and concludes with a view to the south. So here we are looking at the existing condition circa 1990 with the Willamette River flowing from right to left. We're looking east, hovering over the western edge of this portion of the Willamette Valley. You can see the characteristic quilt work pattern of agriculturally dominated lands, some areas of intact bottom land forest, the river with islands sometimes un-vegetated, sometimes vegetated and the camera pulls back slightly and shows you the view looking directly downriver to the north of the Willamette. The next segment of the video has this image of the existing condition circa 1990 present on the screen with the three alternative futures, planned trend 2050, conservation 2050 and development 2050. I'd like to direct your attention to a few of the key differences among the alternative futures. In this part of the landscape and the development scenario, notice how much more rural residential uses there are. In the conservation 2050 scenario, in certain areas along the flood plain of the Willamette River, you will notice expanded areas of flood plain forest, one of the key native habitat types. You'll also notice in the conservation scenario, some additional river channel areas where the natural braided conditions of this reach of the river have been assumed to be restored in the conservation scenario. The video repeats this segment one more time to allow you a chance to compare and contrast them in a little less hurried way. Again, notice the additional rural residential uses in this part of the development scenario, the additional flood plain forest along the flood plain of the main stem in the conservation scenario. Of course, the implications of these choices and assumptions about how the future will unfold affect many different resources. Assumptions about residential density, urban area expansion and agricultural conversion were among key concerns that the citizen stakeholder group had in the Willamette River Basin Alternative Futures Project. I'd now like to show you a series of maps, one for each of the alternative futures that focuses on the effects of different assumptions of urban and rural residential growth and expansion of each of the alternative futures. First, the 2050 conservation scenario. For each of the three maps that I'm going to show you now, the color scheme remains the same. The darkest gray represent the urban areas in the mid 1990s. The yellow represents the urban area expansion under each alternative future scenario. And the red represents where rural residential areas are under each alternative future. The conservation scenario has among the least rural residential expansion and only slightly more urban expansion than planned trend. The planned trend scenario has the least urban expansion, only slightly more rural residential expansion than the conservation scenario. Both the conservation and the planned trend scenarios have significantly less urban expansion and significantly less rural residential expansion than the development scenario. These issues of land conversion and agricultural land loss are of primary concern in this project. One of the reasons why agricultural land loss is of such great concern is that the agricultural land in the valley floor of the Willamette Valley is highly productive. This map shows soils of the Willamette River basin. The darker the green, the more agriculturally productive. Particularly in areas of the river where the land capability of the soils is high for agricultural use and there are water sources proximate to those productive soils, the agricultural value of the land is exceptionally high. This next series of maps puts together the prior series that I just showed you combining the effects of different approaches to urban and rural residential expansion with the loss or conversion of land that is now in agricultural use. Again, the color scheme for these three maps remains the same. The first of these maps shows you the conservation 2050 scenario, showing in orange those lands that the conservation 2050 scenario took out of active agricultural production and converted to some other use. In the conservation scenario, the other uses consisted primarily of conversion to a small amount of urban and rural residential expansion and primarily in the conservation scenario, 1990 agricultural lands were converted to native lowland and upland vegetative communities with the goal of increasing ecological function. The next map, again, using the same color scheme shows you the same kind of information for the planned trend 2050 scenario, showing you in orange the areas that were in agricultural use in 1990 that the planned trend scenario converts to non-agricultural uses by the year 2050. By contrast with conservation scenario, the planned trend scenario converts those 1990 agricultural lands almost exclusively to urban expansion. The third of the three maps shows you the development scenario in 2050, again, using the same color scheme with orange areas being those areas that the development scenario converted from agricultural use in 1990 to some non-agricultural use by the year 2050. In the development 2050 scenario, the entire amount of orange shown is converted from agricultural use in 1990 to urban and rural residential expansion in 2050. Beyond the loss of agricultural soils and the agricultural uses of those soils, another key concern regarding the agricultural portion of the Willamette Valley in this Alternative Futures Project had to do with the effects on terrestrial biodiversity of the different scenarios within the agriculturally dominated part of the basin. Once again, I want to show you three maps beginning with the conservation 2050 scenario. And in this case, what the maps show you are the change in native species richness of terrestrial species within the agriculturally dominated part of the valley. The color scheme in these maps again stays the same across the three futures maps showing in green the areas where there has been an increase in native species richness compared to 1990, showing in white those areas where there has been no change in native species richness compared to 1990, and showing in tan those areas where there has been a decrease in native species richness relative to 1990. So as you can see for the conservation scenario, there has been a significant increase in native species richness, particularly concentrated along the flood plain of the main stem of the Willamette River. You may remember from the video simulation those areas where there was an increase in the amount of native flood plain forests. The comparable native species richness change map for the planned trend map shows you as its name implies very little change. Current policies for protecting prime farm and forest soils in the state of Oregon would lead to very little change, very little increase, very little decrease in native species richness by the year 2050 in this part of the valley. The third of these three native species richness change maps is for the development 2050 scenario. And as you recall, the development scenario converted a great deal of agricultural land to urban and rural residential expansion purposes, but along the way also increased the amount of native vegetation along some portions of the main stem of the Willamette River. Thus you see in some areas an increase of native species richness in this development 2050 native species richness change map. The next series of maps shows you again for each of the three scenarios, first conservation 2050, the patterns of land use and the detail at which those patterns existed. The purpose in showing you these maps is to compare and contrast if you recall, the grain of detail in the maps for the Iowa project, you may recall three meter by three meter descriptions of the conditions on the ground, contrast that with in this Willamette River basin work, a spatial grain of detail 10 times coarser, areas on the ground shown being 30 meters by 30 meters in size. Which for our purposes were adequate for many of the processes which we intended to convey, but as you may recall from Iowa, they had challenges capturing narrow linear features with three meter by three meter grain, we had much the same problem exacerbated, giving a grain of data 30 meters by 30 meters in size. In working with the citizen stakeholder group in the Willamette basin alternative futures project, there were a few key ideas that emerged when it came time to define the assumptions of the conservation 2050 scenario. One of those ideas is that it's actually possible to increase ecological function in the landscape and still maintain short-term economic production from the land. Stakeholders helped us define two tiers of conservation lands, two kinds of conservation lands. The first tier of conservation lands were those in which the natural function of the landscape was preeminent. These lands would be managed with priority given to conserving, creating, and maintaining a naturally functioning landscape. These became known as the tier one conservation lands. A second type of land, also of great importance in the conservation scenario, were those landscapes that came to be referred to as the working landscape, places where farmers and foresters would still be able to manage their lands to produce short-term economic gain, but would do so in ways that increased the importance of habitat protection over time. These lands came to be known as tier two lands, the working landscape. Had an opportunity to go out on the river and look at an on-the-ground example of the tier two lands that we've been talking about. Here at the Confluence of the Long Tom and the Willamette is a good existing example of the tier two or working landscape opportunities provided in this case by Hybrid Poplar, which is a crop that has grown both for pulp or for wood product purposes, can have rotation links between seven and 15 years from time of planting to time of harvest based on whether it's pulp, the shorter rotation, or wood products, the longer rotation, but it does provide some ecological function compared to many other crops that are also suitable for these soils in these locations. From the standpoint of providing incentives to landowners, this is a good example of an opportunity where a nationally based organization like the Natural Resources Conservation Service could provide incentives through programs like the Conservation Reserve Program to encourage landowners to maintain these forests for wood production and keep them growing as trees for longer periods of time rather than the shorter rotations if the landowners are managing the trees in for pulp purposes. With these two concepts of the naturally functioning landscape tier one lands and the working landscape tier two lands in hand, we set about another innovative aspect of this project. And that was working with a group of scientific experts who had key expertise in some of the endangered habitat, vegetative habitat types in the Willamette Valley, and asked them to define for us an amount of acreage of each of four key habitat types that would be necessary to sustain and perpetuity all of the species dependent on those habitat types. The image on the screen shows you a table that compares for each of four of these endangered habitat types, bottom land forest, oak savanna, prairie, and emergent wetlands, how many acres our convened expert group thought were necessary for each habitat type to sustain and perpetuity the species dependent on those habitat types. 147,000 acres of bottom land forest, 70,000 acres of oak savanna, 70 to 75,000 acres of prairie, approximately 3000 acres of emergent wetlands. With those total acre targets for each habitat type in mind, through an iterative process of working with the stakeholder group, the research team went back time after time to the stakeholder group, asking them to help us first define places that were biophysically suited to each of those habitat types, and second then places that were politically plausible to actually convert the target number of acres to each habitat type. As the chart shows, using as an example the bottom land forest, of the 147,000 target acres for total bottom land forest within the basin, our biophysical suitability and political plausibility check translated of those 147,000 total acres, somewhere between 58 and 65,000 of them as tier one naturally functioning landscape, bottom land forest, and somewhere between 82 and 89,000 of the 147,000 acres of bottom land forest as tier two or working landscape. The same process was repeated for oak savanna, prairie, emergent wetlands, and other critical habitat types in the basin. That process produced this map, which came to be known as the conservation and restoration opportunities map. This map then locates in geographically specific location the target number of tier one and tier two acres for each of the habitat types, and actually achieves, and in some cases even slightly exceeds the target number of acres. This conservation and restoration opportunities map became the skeleton or armature around which the larger and more complete conservation 2050 scenario then was fully developed. In addition to these concerns about restoring diminished vegetation types, the conservation scenario also identified opportunities for restoring floodplain function. So we're here at a stretch of the Willamette River, which is currently an off channel alcove called Harkins Lake. Historically, this section of the river was connected to the main stem and water flowed through it at high flow events. Changes in the early part of the 20th century to increase the amount of agricultural land built revetments and road embankments on top of those revetments to disconnect Harkins Lake from the active Willamette River channel. Some relatively minor modifications creation of a culvert underneath an existing road embankment would reconnect the historic channel that is now Harkins Lake and expand and increase the amount of active river channel and off channel habitat. So this is an opportunity such as illustrated in the conservation scenario for the Willamette River basin to increase channel complexity at floodplain forest and off channel flood storage. With each of the three alternative futures, the 1990 landscape and a map of land cover conditions prior to Euro-American settlement circa mid-19th century all complete. The next phase of the Willamette basin alternative futures work turned to evaluating each of these alternatives, evaluating the effects of the past land use land cover condition on a number of key environmental resources, the present and the three alternative futures. In depicting these results existing conditions are used as a kind of reference with future conditions and the past being either better or worse relative to the conditions that we find at present. The histogram that I'd like to show you now summarizes for the set of natural resource effects that were evaluated, how 1850 conditions compared to the present and how each of the three alternative future conditions compared to the present. Let me explain a little bit about how this graph is organized so you can read it. As I mentioned before, these results are presented to show difference relative to conditions in the present. Where conditions improve relative to the present, the colored bars on the histogram occur above the zero baseline. Where conditions are worse than the present, the colored bars on the histogram occur below the zero baseline. So let's take a look at the histogram. On the left side are a series of colored bars that summarize for each of the natural resource indicators which we used as a value of yardsticks, how conditions in the middle of the 19th century would compare to the present. For each of those natural resource indicators, conditions were significantly better in the mid 19th century than they are circa 1990. Not too surprising, there's been significant change to this landscape in the last 150 years with the population ranging about 10,000 in the mid 19th century to over 2 million today. Somewhat surprisingly, the conservation scenario which is to the right of the historical scenario on the histogram shows not as high an improvement as the historical scenario showed relative to 1990 conditions, but a significant improvement. In fact, one of the important summary statements that we feel able to make at this point having concluded these evaluations is that the conservation 2050 scenario restores somewhere between 20 and 65% of the ecological function that has been lost in the Willamette River Basin since the mid 19th century. Plan trend, the set of colored bars to the right of the conservation 2050 scenario shows that for every natural resource indicator we evaluated, conditions will worsen under plan trend 2050 assumptions relative to 1990. Less old growth conifers, less woody riparian zones, poor quality native terrestrial wildlife habitat, and so on. And the third of the three future scenarios, the development 2050 scenario, makes conditions generally worse still than plan trend with slight exception to the increase in amount of main river habitat as you saw in earlier slides. I want to end my comments on the Willamette River Basin alternative futures case study, giving you an example of the kinds of conclusions that projects of this kind and scope can be expected to provide. In general, it took more than 150 years in the Willamette River Basin to reach a population of the first 2 million people. Projections show it will take less than 50 years to add the next 2 million for a total of four. So the pace of change is quickening. There has been more change and thus more environmental effects in the basin in the previous 150 years than our citizen stakeholder group thought plausible in the next 50 years, regardless of the future scenario and importantly, none of these alternative future evaluations forecast environmental doom for the basin, although there are significant differences in environmental qualities among the futures and significant local variations within the futures in terms of their environmental effects. More specifically, if the people in this part of the state wish to protect and restore native biodiversity as an important dimension of healthy watersheds, we recommend the following. Apply coordinated incentives to implement a riparian conservation and restoration network in those high priority zones shown previously on the conservation and restoration opportunities map. Minimize urban and rural residential development in 100-year flood plains and actively look for opportunities to reverse past development of buildings and structures within those same flood plains. Manage reservoirs to achieve more natural flow regimes in the regulated rivers of the basin and capitalize on the water temperature reduction potential of the Willamette River by allowing it to flow through more of the near river gravel zones. Regarding in-stream and out-of-stream uses of water, a particularly critical issue in a drought year in the Western United States, one of the things we found was that regardless of the alternative future scenario, conservation, planned trend development, future changes in crop type and distribution are likely to lead to increased water withdrawals for irrigation uses. We recommend that ways be explored for voluntarily retired irrigation water rights to convert to in-stream water rights with the original priority dates of those water rights. Regarding urban and rural residential expansion, we recommend that more use be made of the current knowledge of terrestrial and aquatic patterns of biodiversity in deciding where urban and rural residential expansions will occur. Provide sufficient financial incentives in those priority habitat areas, which you saw mapped before, to take advantage of design and planning innovations that allow for development and habitat conservation to coexist. And last, establish a Willamette River Basin Environmental Observation Network with attention focused initially on those areas destined for near-term change. These general types of recommendations resulting from this alternative futures analysis of the Willamette River Basin are relevant for many large rivers in urban and agricultural watersheds across the U.S. To conclude by comments on the use of alternative future analysis approaches in the context of the natural resource conservation service planning approach, I just want to repeat how compatible these two approaches are. There are some key things that get accentuated in alternative futures approach, such as mapping in very spatially explicit ways, changes in land and water use in the alternative futures. This kind of very careful and detailed mapping is often controversial, particularly in lands that are dominated by private ownership. In these instances, the use of citizen-driven assumptions for defining the alternative futures and how they will vary within themselves and across the set of alternative futures is one important strategy for helping implement this alternative futures approach. And finally, there are a number of resources which are available for people who wish to learn more about alternative futures approaches and how to carry them out in areas that you're interested in with the people that you know who live on those lands. A few website addresses as well as a bibliography are available in the course materials. Thanks very much.