POSTPONED - Travis Shaul's Graduate Defense Seminar

This defense has been postponed.

A Graduate Defense Seminar will be presented by Travis Shaul, MS student in Environmental Social Sciences, on Thursday, June 26th at 10:30 a.m. in 370 Kottman Hall. He will present Implementation of Best Management Practices of Collaboratively Developed Watershed Action Plans in the Maumee River Watershed.

Significant time and effort are put into developing Watershed Action Plans (WAPs) to address water quality impairments throughout Ohio. These WAPs are developed collaboratively with a broad range of stakeholders representing various interests. Each one of these parties has an expressed concern as to how the watershed is managed. There is sufficient literature that addresses how collaborative watershed plans are developed, and how citizen participation is essential to plan development, Koontz, et al. 2004, Koehler & Koontz 2008, Leach & Pelkey 2001, Chess et. al 2000. However, implementation of best management practices (BMPs) is not addressed for WAPs in the literature. The main objective of this research is to see if WAPs affect implementation of BMPs, and if yes, to what degree. The research questions this study concentrates on are, “What factors affect implementation of BMP recommendations of WAPs?” and “What proportion of listed recommendations have been done?” The study includes three primary watersheds in Northeast Ohio; the Lower Maumee Watershed, the Portage River Watershed, and the Blanchard Watershed. Through the use of snow-ball sampling identification of key stakeholders responsible for implementation of BMPs, sixteen interviews were conducted to answer the research questions. The results suggest that watershed coordinators are not only essential to the development of collaboration, but also to prompt other parties to implement BMPs in the watershed. The significance of this research is that it can help other collaborative environmental plan developers to determine factors necessary in aiding implementation of their initiatives.