Grading Rivers: Pros and Cons

By Ken Lubinski, US Geological Survey, Retired

(Part 1 of 3)

Many concerned people, not just conservationists but manufacturers, farmers, politicians and the media, often ask “How healthy is the Upper Mississippi River? A good question, perhaps the most important one, but one that is extremely hard to answer. I’ve been put on the spot many times to provide a sound-bite answer to the question when people discover that I’m a river ecologist. Thirty years ago I would begin my response by digging right into the scientific evidence. It took me a surprisingly long time to notice that my response tended to make the asker’s eyes glaze over. Now before I answer, I poke around a little to see if I can figure out why the question has been posed. I’m not trying to be evasive. It’s just that I’ve learned that the most direct and valuable answer, the one that best reflects a complex truth, is one that takes context into account. As a scientist, I’m glad the question is being asked. A fair, objective, and peer-reviewed status report about a natural resource can be especially important in addressing the resource’s problems.

Unfortunately, two common reasons the question is being asked today only indirectly apply to resource protection or restoration. When the answer is needed to “send a message” or to lend credibility to a poorly disguised fund-raising effort, the result is often more about the asker than the resource. If someone wants to increase tourism, they’ll emphasize the positive aspects of the resource and ignore everything else. To divert attention from a problem, the asker may distract readers by overemphasizing other negatives. Supportive evidence is cherry-picked in order to yield a preconceived answer (in this case the internet actually does us a disservice, making factoids easily available to any web surfer). The resulting conclusions and recommendations become slanted, and any consequent actions or decisions are easily misdirected. The “science” (almost all assessments claim to be science-based) in turn becomes suspect, and the whole process is discredited. It’s not the best way to clear a path toward holistic resource management, let alone sustainable behavior.

In the last 10-20 years, the ecosystem health question, whether it has targeted a river, watershed, estuary, forest, or park, has started to take on a life of its own. Resource assessments have swung in the direction of “report cards.” I’m on record as a strong supporter of report-carding, and argued strongly for including a report card in the first 10-year report of the Long Term Monitoring Program for the Upper Mississippi River. A well done report card synthesizes a lot of information in a way that is understood by and actionable for a highly diverse but non-technical audience. Many of these groups, to which resource management has previously been inaccessible, increasingly want their voices to be heard as concepts like sustainability are defined.

Synthesis of lots of data is not easy. But it is easy to assume that a report card, intended to be quantitatively derived (thus comparable to others), clear, and concise (one or two pages), should require less time and energy than a 200-page environmental assessment. The fact is that good report cards come from the same amount of hard technical digging required by long assessments, plus the added work of synthesis. The final product may be smaller, but the work is harder, and takes longer.

There are hidden costs of good report-carding. Adequate time has to be spent in the initial planning stages to address the why, what, where, how, and when questions. In addition, “who” questions need to be answered. Who should/will do the reporting? Who is responsible for responding to the results? Who will be accountable if solutions don’t work? Many groups that envision developing a report card concentrate too early and too much on the how questions, like “Which variables should be measured?” Such efforts tend to become data rich and information poor.

If you’ll bear with me through parts 2 and 3 of this essay, I’ll try to focus on some of the details of thewhy and who questions as they relate to grading rivers. I won’t be throwing any stones at specific report carding efforts. Each such effort is eventually judged best by the cards intended audience. When I’m done I hope you’ll have a better sense of what to look for in a well done report card. It should come as no surprise that a river’s final grade, from A to F, has no bearing per se on the effectiveness of the grading process. The process itself just has to accurately reflect the river’s actual condition.