We asked Doug Shields what he thought was a pressing issue for the field of stream restoration, and here’s what he had to say:

“At some point we need to shift gears from stream restoration—which to me has the connotation that you’re going to a relatively short reach of stream or river and trying to fix the things that are wrong—into stream management, which has to do with how we plan and design in the riparian zone or the stream corridor on a global scale. In the first instance, we’re trying to make amends for things we’ve done wrong and moving back to some previous perceived superior condition. In the second case, we’re more forward looking, and we’re trying to work at the landscape scale. In order to really have a measurable impact on the resource through time, I feel we need to think more along those lines and paint with a broader brush.

For example, one of the most serious problems we have in watershed hydrology today is channel destabilization due to elevated runoff—runoff which occurs whenever we deforest a watershed for agriculture or for urban development, thereby removing natural vegetation by paving over it or cultivating it. I think we can be most helpful in the long run by looking at ways that we can manage the landscape to get more water infiltrating and less water running off. People are starting to adopt some strategies to address this issue—like green roofs and porous pavements—but I really believe that this is going to be a fruitful research area going forward if we can come up with some really bright and new ideas about ways to tackle problems at the watershed scale.”