Upper Stony Creek Watershed Restoration

Location:

California (within Mendocino
National Forest)

What lessons can be drawn?

Gilgert identified several lessons from his experience with the Upper Stony Creek Watershed Project for building effective partnerships. First, he cautioned that change tends to be incremental, and that anyone working to promote change needs to be patient and help people ease into the new program or approach. He recommended finding and involving the innovators in the community, the people willing to do things first. Those people can provide a model for others to follow. Although he said early successes were important in gaining trust and building support, he also emphasized the importance of learning from failures. He said, “You cannot be afraid of failures. Don’t try to hide them. One, because other people will find out about them. Two, you learn critical things from them and allow other people to learn from them.” He noted, “Anybody who has worked in natural resources has had a train wreck, but nobody wants to talk about it. We waste money, resources and time because we don’t learn the valuable lessons that failure teaches us.”

Nay highlighted two additional lessons from the Upper Stony Creek Watershed Project. First, like Gilgert, Nay suggested that trust takes a long time to build. Therefore, he believes in the need to commit and maintain long-term staff on projects, stating that, “You can’t be turning over staff every 2-3 years. People aren’t going to get into long-term agreements with the government when the staff keeps rolling over.” Nay’s second lesson concerns monitoring. He explained that monitoring “is something we always said we were going to do, yet we’ve never staffed people to do it. We went right into contracts as if we knew what we were doing was the right thing, and we’ve only done monitoring when we’ve had the extra time to do it.” Consequently, there is no substantive way to evaluate the progress or success of the project. Nay stated that, “While we have people that feel really good about the project and have anecdotal evidence that says we’re doing some really neat stuff, we don’t have any strong measures to quantify the success of our projects. Now we’re twelve years into our project and people are asking us, ‘What was it like when you started?’” Recognizing the shortcomings in monitoring, the NRCS has committed to initiate a monitoring program and has identified funding through the Bureau of Reclamation to establish some monitoring in the watershed.

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