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Introduction

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The Gila River originates in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico and flows west across Arizona to join the Colorado River near Yuma. Above the San Carlos Reservoir, the Upper Gila River Watershed flows free of large dams, and sustains several perennial stretches that provide habitat for a large number of plants and animals. The river is also an essential source of water for municipal and agricultural water users. The University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center (WRRC), the Gila Watershed Partnership (GWP), and University of Arizona Cooperative Extension worked to develop tools to support water resources planning for sustained environmental and human use in the Upper Gila River Watershed.

Key Issues Addressed

Communities in western North America face increasing demand on water resources exacerbated by stress from projected drought and climate conditions. The Upper Gila River Watershed supports a diversity of economic activities and ecological communities that depend on a healthy and functioning watershed. However, long-term sustainability of human livelihood and natural resources requires collaborative planning. Water resources planning allows stakeholders to collectively address uncertainties and develop strategies to sustain human and environmental values into the future. New planning tools and models are needed to effectively and consistently account for all water users, including human communities, agriculture, industry, and wildlife. 

Project Goals

• Develop and demonstrate a methodology for developing baseline assessments and forward-looking scenarios needed to support water resource planning and management that incorporates both human and environmental water needs in the Upper Gila River Watershed
• Provide online resources and engagement strategies to support communities in planning for secure water supplies now and into the future

Project Highlights

• Atlas of the Upper Gila Watershed: The project team assembled 62 unique spatial datasets, ranging from soil erodibility to instream flow right applications, into a single geospatial database for the Upper Gila River Watershed. These datasets were used to develop an atlas of watershed resources in a format accessible to stakeholders without GIS technologies. The Atlas contains maps of resource conditions accompanied by narrative text that describes management challenges.
• Modeling Watershed Change: As part of the Atlas, the project team built an Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) model to determine the impacts of changing land use and management actions on water resources. AGWA can also examine the effects of fire, implementation of stream buffer zones, and installation of retention and detention structures.
• Scenario Development: Stakeholder-driven scenario narratives were developed  to inform cooperative water resource planning under uncertain future conditions. Scenario narratives describe qualitative and quantitative changes to the watershed, with particular focus on likely and high-risk events that require extensive planning The scenarios were centered around four “meta-themesâ€� related to critical uncertainties and drivers of change identified by the community.
• Resources to Inform Watershed Planning: Two guidebooks were published through the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension. The guidebooks outline methodologies and lessons learned for rural watershed planning in the southwestern United States and specifically cover baseline watershed assessments and scenario planning. The guidebooks detail the processes of engaging stakeholders, assembling data, and identifying next steps for watershed planning.
• Integrating Social and Cultural Aspects: Project partners hosted a special meeting centered around the shared history of the region. Members of the community came together to share their memories of significant events in the history of the region, and build on each other’s memories. These memories were used to create a timeline of important events in the history of the watershed to highlight the events and resources that are important to the community. The information generated through the shared history exercise has been supplemented by additional research conducted by the WRRC. This exercise was important for engaging community stakeholders and provided essential historical context for watershed planning. 

Lessons Learned

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• Ensuring the efforts of all partner organizations were well-coordinated required a significant time investment. During the course of the project there were multiple separate, but related, projects in the watershed. The project team coordinated these projects to take advantage of overlap and minimize confusion about each project’s purpose and goals.
• Getting input from all key stakeholders was sometimes challenging and required extensive planning. In addition to soliciting input at workshops and monthly steering committee meetings, the project team set up individual meetings to get feedback from interested stakeholders who could not attend.
• It was difficult to convey the complexity of the scenario planning process in a way that would make it useful to the stakeholders in the watershed, but also keep the process robust enough to provide accurate insights into the future. These challenges led the project team to modify the traditional scenario planning process by creating four “meta-themesâ€� centered around critical uncertainties with broad implications for management planning. 

Next Steps

State of the Watershed: The baseline assessment and scenario development will be used to inform a comprehensive water supply and demand study as part of a larger “State of the Watershed� assessment.

• Work with the Gila Watershed Partnership and others to explore answers to the scenario key questions and new outlets for exploring those questions
• Incorporate watershed planning results into the Gila Watershed Partnership’s “Watershed Assessment Planâ€� to provide informed recommendations based on the ecological, social, and hydrologic attributes of the watershed (to be completed in July 2018)

Funding Partners

• Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative

Resources

Contacts

• Ashley Hullinger, Research Analyst, Water Resources Research Center, University of Arizona, [email protected]
• Kelly Mott LaCroix, US Forest Service [email protected]
• Aaron Lien, Assistant Research Scientist, University of Arizona, [email protected]

Case Study Lead Author

• Ashlee Simpson, CART Graduate Research Assistant, University of Arizona

Suggested Citation

Simpson, A. C. (2018). “Water Resources Management Planning: A Demonstration on the Upper Gila River.â€� CART. Retrieved from /project/water-resources-demonstration-gila-river.