A Q‐method survey of stream restoration practitioners in the Driftless Area, USA

Abstract

Stream restoration has become increasingly common, both globally and specifically in the United States. Though stream restoration has become a common freshwater management practice, there are debates around what constitutes "success" in restored systems and whether this success should incorporate both scientific and stakeholderdefined endpoints. In our study context, the Upper Mississippi River Basin's Driftless

Use of Mixed Methods in the Science of Hydrological Extremes: What Are Their Contributions?

“…These coded and categorized data were integrated into statistical analysis software and interpreted through a principal component analysis and a centroid factor analysis. Another example of using this mixed approach with the Q-method is given by Lundberg et al [58], who analyzed stream restoration in the Driftless area, USA.…”

Grass versus trees: A proxy debate for deeper anxieties about competing stream worlds

“…To attend to these underflows and their possibilities, we have been monitoring restorationand flood-induced changes in geomorphology, habitat, vegetation, and stream temperature on area stream reaches, gathered 165 flood-focused oral narratives with community members, and conducted 34 semi-structured research interviews with Driftless Area stream managers, including the 18 riparian vegetation focused interviews that we focus on here, recorded from August 2018 to November 2020 with two federal employees, eight current or retired state employees, six non-profit employees, and two private consultants. Interviews were conversational in nature but followed a script based on local knowledge and related research (Lyons et al, 2000;Lave, 2012;Gottschalk Druschke & Hychka, 2015;Hychka & Gottschalk Druschke, 2017;Lundberg et al, 2022) and included questions about the interviewee's background in stream restoration, how their views have changed over time, their trusted sources of information, their perspectives related to riparian grass and trees in the region, and their views on stream health, restoration goals, and restoring for form versus process. This study was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was determined to be exempt.…”

“…Instead, we want to argue that this intense conflict about riparian grass and riparian trees serves as a proxy debate, what Malkowski (2014: 243) defined as “a rhetorical process wherein overt public attention paid to distinct individuals and/or particular issues within situated contexts creates and conveys meaning about larger, nebulous social concerns.” In that same text, she suggested that “proxy debate” is “a public argument strategy whereby the language of one issue or topic stands in for and distracts from other, recurrent system-level problems” (Malkowski, 2014: 119). Further, Malkowski (2014: 243) argued that attention to the idea of a proxy debate can turn our attention to “gridlocks and standstills,” to arguments engaged “strategically, suggestively, and sometimes distractingly,” and arguments that are used to speak about “other anxieties more generally.”…”

“…As we detailed at the outset, we hoped to highlight the surface flows of this restoration debate over riparian vegetation and consider its underflows, building from Wölfle Hazard's (2022) first definition of underflows as “the parts of a river that can’t be seen,” in both their “watery materiality and in the discourses and politics that shape river governance.” We complemented that approach with Malkowski's (2014) notion of the proxy debate—“a public argument strategy whereby the language of one issue or topic stands in for and distracts from other, recurrent system-level problems”—to consider how these surface flows often work to distract from and obscure these related underflows, a move we suggest opens space for the work of Wölfle Hazard's (2022: 9) second definition of underflows, as “method,” as “a practice, an orientation, and an invitation to attend to hidden flows and their movements, excesses, and relations. The underflows method is of and for movements that protect and strengthen well-being in the face of settler state violence, which attempts to erase ways of living otherwise.”…”

“…In the work that follows, we look first to the surface flows of restoration discourse in the Driftless Area as managers argue over the role of riparian vegetation in trout- and flood-focused restoration efforts, then we attend to the underflows that lie beneath the surface: competing visions of scale, temporality, dynamism, and the very essence of a Driftless stream. In doing so, we argue that what seems like a scientific debate about riparian grass versus riparian trees actually serves as a proxy debate , Malkowski’s (2014: 119) term for “a public argument strategy whereby the language of one issue or topic stands in for and distracts from other, recurrent system-level problems.” As we argue, this proxy debate about grass versus trees is a surficial distraction from much deeper anxieties about what a stream is and should be, about past, present, and future (temporality), about myopia and connection (scale), and about the dynamic possibilities for stream systems (dynamism).…”