Watershed Collaborations: Entanglements with common streams

Along California's North Coast, where salmon hover on the cusp of extinction, scientists and local residents seek new collaborations. Agencies, tribes, and watershed councils commission competing studies to determine links between human water use, oceanic cycles, and salmon decline. Modelers turn to ranchers' expert opinions to condition hydrologic models. Ranchers import beavers to build dams that may raise the water table. These watershed collaborations begin to transcend boundaries of human institutions, scientist / lay person, and even species. Restoring salmon-bearing streams is a project to reconfigure human relationships to water and inhabitation practices. In/ninfrastructures./nthe western U.S., this project necessarily entails a serious grappling with Manifest/nDestiny legacies of Native American sovereignty, property regimes, legal doctrines, and water/nMy dissertation investigates how watershed collaborations transform scientific practices,/nenvironmental subjectivities, and trans-species relations, using Salmon Creek (Sonoma Co., CA) as a/ncase. Salmon Creek is typical of thousands of small watersheds in the Pacific West in that summer/nwater extractions by farmers and rural residents dry many tributaries into a series of disconnected/npools. This anthropogenic drought compounds historic beaver removal, logging, and road building/nthat have altered water, sediment, and large wood supply to the stream, limiting steelhead/n(Oncorhynchus mykiss) and coho salmon (O. kisutch) recovery. I argue that collaborative watershed/nresearch that refuses to privilege expert science over local and Indigenous knowledges can create/nnovel modes of scientific practice, discursive shifts, and new governance approaches. I stretch the/nlimits of the terms ‘watershed’ and ‘collaboration’ to encompass interactions among (1) scientists/nand local knowledge holders, (2) living species and the landscapes they inhabit, and (3) humans and/nother species that depend on riverine ecosystems. Though disparate in methodology, the fields/n—Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Politics, and Eco-/nhydrology—share a commitment to critically re-working social-natural boundaries./nNatural flow regimes—dynamic streamflow patterns that drive riverine biodiversity—arise/nfrom a kind of collaboration between climatic factors, geology, plants, and animals in a river basin,/nand are then further shaped by human ground and surface water diversions. Regarding the/necosystem as a collaboratory in which humans play a role, Quantifying abiotic habitat characteristics/nto determine thresholds for salmonid oversummer survival in intermittent streams investigates the/nrole of different flow-mediated factors (dissolved oxygen, temperature, groundwater inflow, and/npool volume) affect juvenile coho and steelhead occurrence in two Salmon Creek tributaries./nDrawing on three years of juvenile fish surveys, synoptic water and isotope monitoring and/nstreamflow gauging to populate statistical models, I found that low dissolved oxygen and pool/nvolume limit survival; however both salmonid species can survive in spring-fed intermittent pools/nthat contain sheltering logs or overhanging banks. Citizen science surveys of stream drying patterns/nand salmon occurrence can complement agency monitoring and should be incorporated into salmon/nrecovery efforts./nRegarding human collaboratives of knowledge and practice, ‘Thinking with salmon about/nrain tanks: stream commons as intra-actions’ puts forth the argument that cultural practices of water/nuse evolve in response to new understandings of other species' dependence on shared streams./nSome Salmon Creek residents who install rain cisterns to curtail summer water use do so out of/nconcern for salmon, and describe salmon and other riverine creatures as having rights to enough/nwater to survive that are of the same status as human rights to water. Other residents are unwilling/nto reduce water use because the connection between their wells and the stream are poorly/nunderstood and difficult to measure./ndissertation contributes to/nthis/n‘Rain tanks, springs, and broken pipes as emerging water/ncommons along Salmon Creek, CA, USA’/n. Residents who participate in monitoring salmon populations, water quality, and their own springs and rain tanks report that these activities have increased their sense of interdependence with other human and nonhuman neighbors/nwho rely on the watershed’s limited water sources. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) concepts of apparatus and intra-action, I argue that the notion of water as an interspecies commons is co- evolving with rainwater harvesting and that collective choice frameworks that embrace both management practices and environmental imaginaries represent a coherent alternative both to state and market frameworks of water governance and to traditional adaptive management methods and discourses./nfoment discourses that bring humans and other species — especially beaver and salmon, which affect water and nutrient cycles and thus are considered/n"ecosystem engineers"— into symbiotic relations with mutual responsibilities. In the conclusion, I explore how these/npractices and local knowledge of springs, aquifers, and rainfall/ndevelops a method for studying up from household water/nMobilizing approaches from feminist Science and Technology Studies, the introduction/nextends the idea of watershed collaborations to encompass humans and other species. I draw on/nextended interviews with scientists, policy-makers, and local residents to argue that members of/nknowledge practice collaboratives/nconcepts of multi-species collaboratives may filter up from local collaborations/ninto public water and species recovery debates, and consider limitations to more entangled/napproaches to watershed governance./nSalmon Creek is geographically small and removed from major river basins, yet functions as/na kind of microcosm of the political, cultural, and ecological tempests these salmon recovery and/necological restoration projects stir up at any scale. Salmon are simultaneously a global fishery/nresource, a key subsistence and cultural resource for traditional peoples around the Pacific, a/nscientific project to avert extinction, and a contested site of knowledge production. In asking what/nforms of collaboration are productive, and how collaborations transform those who undertake them,/nthis research contributes to debates on practice and ethics inherent in environmental governance in/nthe Anthropocene era.

Advisor: Ray, Isha
Carlson, Stephanie M