Monitoring, Restoration, and Source Water Protection: Canadian Community-Based Environmental Organizations’ Efforts towards Improving Aquatic Ecosystem Health

Abstract

Abstract:In Canada, environmental monitoring has been the responsibility of government for decades; however, funding cutbacks have left many agencies unable to provide comprehensive coverage. This has stimulated a rise in community-based water monitoring (CBWM) organizations. These organizations, operating at multiple scales, have tasked themselves with monitoring aquatic ecosystems. Additionally, they often engage in restoration projects stemming from their monitoring work. Despite the growing abundance of CBWM organizations, there is uncertainty as to whether their activities lead to aquatic ecosystem benefits. A thematic analysis of photographic and qualitative interview data was employed to examine restoration projects conducted by five CBWM organizations, and the projects' potential impact on source waters. Findings show that while they are conducting activities that show physical change, which is indicative of ecosystem improvement, examples of measurable responses within aquatic ecosystems remain rare. Monitoring, restoration, and source water protection processes are challenged by a lack of funding, capacity, and monitoring procedures. Funding, particularly, restricted the extent to which monitoring could be conducted and influenced project scope and scale. This leads to a lack of capacity to conduct large-scale restoration and rigorous scientific monitoring. Consequently, our findings highlight the issues with detecting effects of small-scale projects at the watershed scale.

Ontario’s Clean Water Act and Capacity Building: Implications for Serviced Rural Municipalities

“…Recent studies have shown that engaging the public in community-based water monitoring can be a viable option when government funding declines. However, these types of programs still need to be provided with adequate financial, institutional, social and technical/human capacity to succeed [42]. Human capacity has already been diminished from its original level in the preliminary phases of the creation of the source protection plans.…”

Community-Based Monitoring in Response to Local Concerns: Creating Usable Knowledge for Water Management in Rural Land

“…Furthermore, as most human territories have no hydrological boundaries, a CBWM network can help involve other groups or communities within co-management schemes [23,25], when local decisions are being made. In practice, CBWM can generate data on long term trends and seasonal changes in order to create best-management practices that improve the control of soil erosion [26], protection of clean water bodies [26], groundwater management [27], and restoration activities [28][29][30], particularly in regions for which water data are lacking or difficult to access [26]. However, the establishment of CBWM faces a number of credibility challenges, given the low resolution of some monitoring tests used and that the citizens collecting the data may lack technical accreditation.…”

“…Unlike other resource monitoring, CBWM generates data that local communities and other stakeholders can use almost immediately to understand the effects of their activities on their territory [34]. Databases register the long-term behavior and trends, while single monitoring sessions allow CBWM to work as an early-warning system for local and regional stakeholders [25,28].…”

“…CBWM databases can be used to identify local community problems to be addressed internally, from those that are more regional relating to other communities and actors. Water data provide information about specific pollution problems across the basin, and these should be used when there are challenges in the land-use planning (e.g., expansion of avocado production, permitted forestry activities) so that human activities do not endanger water security [28,58,59]. In order to take care of water, land-use planning can be informed by long-term databases, showing the local to regional history of the basins [49].…”

Fish Community Dynamics in the Artificial Fishways of Three Different Watersheds, and Fish Passage Evaluations Using a Multi-Metric Fishway Model

“…Studies monitoring fishways have primarily been conducted in the United States, Canada, and Australia [21][22][23][24]. A representative example is the monitoring of fish using a fishway through visual monitoring and video recording, but a significant limitation of these techniques is that visibility varies greatly depending on the turbidity or transmittance of the water [25].…”