About

Source streams, or headwaters, are often provided with the least protection from forestry and other land uses. However, the impact on ecological status of small streams from increasing water temperature, mobilising sediment, nutrients and contaminants may overwhelm the resilience of these stream ecosystems. Moreover, such changes initiate the downstream transport of these altered conditions. Protection of source streams by providing sufficient buffers is considered to be costly, but that is primarily as opportunity costs for industry.

SOSTPRO aims to estimate the ecological, hydrological, water quality, and economic consequences of different management scenarios (e.g., buffers), by comparing the economic and social trade-offs for different value sets and management practices, and to reduce uncertainty of how these possible impacts integrate across scales. 

The objectives of SOSTPRO are to:

• Develop a model platform to explore the consequences of various forms of streamside management around source (headwater) streams.
• Augment the available data for small stream responses to forest management across our varied landscapes, using comparisons of harvested versus unharvested (no recent harvests) with and without riparian reserves, and to compare headwater versus larger streams.

Results

Process-based models to compare outcomes (local and catchment scale) of different scenarios for streamside protection. This will be integrated with an economic analysis of costs of the different scenarios.