ConserveOnline - Minnesota Environmental Flows/EcoHydrology

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To facilitate the development of biological/ecological criteria as a new tool in Minnesota water managers' toolbox for assessing and protecting environmental flows / ecosystem hydrology

Developing Biological and Ecological Criteria to Protect Environmental Flows within Minnesota's Great Lakes Basin (and Beyond)

Kristen Blann, PhD, Freshwater Ecologist, TNC, MN-ND-SD chapter

Status/Update (April 2012). In January we released the final Phase I report assessing needs and making recommendations for the state. In Phase I, we held two major environmental flows workshops involving key university and agency scientists and policy staff, as well as numerous technical work group meetings to identify needs, discuss development of hydrologic data to support understanding ecological response to flow and altered flow, and characterizing ecosystem needs for flow. The report also summarized a literature review and survey of relevant approaches being explored or adopted in states throughout the country.

We are moving forward to implement and secure funding for Phase II, including a recent flow ecology workshop showcasing recent progress on data and models for Lake Superior flow ecology analysis. Working with technical work teams, we are working on moving forward on the hydrologic foundation for ELOHA (models of groundwater surface water interactions and synthetic hydrographs for Minnesota's drainage network, from which key environmental flow component statistics can be derived) as well as regional and statewide flow ecology analysis. We continue to facilitate discussion on integration of agency monitoring, modeling,and coordination efforts to achieve consensus on priorities. We are also continuing to discuss approaches to risk-based screening and decision-support tools for permitting and other applications. Also See:

Final Report - Developing Ecological Criteria for Sustainable Water Management in Minnesota
Presentations from Workshop 1, Orientation to ELOHA, Duluth, MN http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/mn-eloha-workshop1
Presentations from Workshop 2, Flow Ecology, Mounds View, MN http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/mn-eloha-workshop
Workshop 3 Proceedings, Opportunities to Move Flow Ecology Analysis forward in MN's Great Lakes Basin http://www.conserveonline.org/workspaces/mn-eloha-workshop3

Background. The Great Lakes Compact signed into law in 2008 seeks to "protect, conserve, restore, improve and effectively manage the Waters and Water Dependent Natural Resources of the Basin." It also establishes as a purpose "to prevent significant adverse impacts of withdrawals and losses on the Basin's ecosystems and watersheds." The compact requires all basin states to implement water withdrawal management programs by December 2012.

Although Minnesota has one of the more comprehensive water appropriation permitting processes in the states, there is a clearly recognized need for a more comprehensive framework for evaluating the ecological and biological impacts of water withdrawals (and flow alterations in general). Such a framework has potential applications in the Water Appropriation regulatory process as well as in watershed and landscape scale planning processes. With the addition of this information, Minnesota could become a model for other states in developing standards for protecting environmental flows and moving forward on implementation of the Great Lakes compact. This project is designed to build capacity towards that ultimate goal.

In the spring of 2010, Crystal Light provided TNC with a $100,000 grant to develop an ecological health accounting system for the Minnesota Great Lakes to complement the state's existing water management system, and to help identify biological criteria to support ecologically sustainable water resource planning and adaptive management.

Objective: Development of recommendations, a framework, and ecological/biological criteria and indicators that can be used in a management/policy context to assess flow alterations and define adverse resource impacts.

Project Description and Scope: The Nature Conservancy will implement our "Ecological Limits of Hydrologic Alteration (ELOHA)" framework in Minnesota to assess available data, criteria, tools and approaches needed to meet the overall goal of ecologically sustainable instream flow protection, as well as identify gaps and needs. Products will be developed through a collaborative process with the public agencies in Minnesota and other experts, and as a component of a developing partnership between the Conservancy and USGS across the Great Lakes. The process will 1) inventory existing datasets, 2) conduct a survey of regionally relevant frameworks currently used or in development (including the MN watershed assessment tool), 3) conduct a scoping workshop to refine the scope of work, and 4) define ecologically relevant flow parameters and indicators, including evaluation of relevant aquatic system classifications and studies linking flow alteration to biological response. Final products would include a report evaluating the primary options for implementation with recommendations for next steps, identifying gaps in data or understanding, implementing such an approach via management and policy, and assessment and monitoring for adaptive management.

The ELOHA approach involves essentially 5 steps: 1) build a hydrologic foundation, 2) develop and apply a river classification, 3) select hydrologic statistics and assess hydrologic alteration, 4) develop spatially explicit models of the flow ecology-response relationship, and 5) apply environmental flow criteria in permit decisions. Versions of this process have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented in several other states, notably Pennsylvania, MI, OH, and CT. Michigan has developed and implemented water appropriations regulations and permitting regulations and decision tools to protect instream flows based on thresholds for adverse impacts to different stream classes.

A solid foundation has been laid for many of these steps in Minnesota. For example, the state has extensive datasets on stream biological response, primarily fish and macroinvertebrates, developed for assessing stream, lake, and watershed conditions. Although water quality is the primary focus of this work, impairments to biota due to water volume fluctuations may be statistically identifiable. These datasets could potentially be used in conjunction with spatially or temporally rich streamflow datasets to try to develop hypotheses linking flow alteration parameters to some sort of IBI response. The project may also use data from pilot watersheds in northeastern Minnesota to develop general stressor-response relationships between flow alteration and ecological health for MN Great Lakes streams. Scoping workshops will help to refine the focus of this work on select steps as well as building shared understanding among the agencies and stakeholders for how to proceed.

For more information, contact Kristen Blann, kblann@tnc.org.

Document created June, 2010. Last modified January, 2012.