CNH2-S: Interactive Dynamics of Stream Restoration and Flood Resilience in a Changing Climate

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The Upper Mississippi River Basin has seen increasingly frequent flooding in recent years, a trend that will almost certainly worsen. Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds have experienced at least three 100-year floods in the last decade, and there is an urgent need to understand how to address and adapt to this new reality. In response, this CNH2-S project brings together researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Indiana University with cross-disciplinary expertise in biophysical and social approaches to stream restoration and flooding. Working closely with local partners in the Kickapoo and Coon Creek watersheds, the research team will use interviews and online surveys with local decision-makers, land and water managers, and agricultural landowners to learn about changing attitudes towards stream restoration and to inform the development of new flood models that work from the level of an individual section of stream to an entire watershed. Those models will be refined through a series of interactive workshops, resulting in locally informed models. The project team’s emphasis on public engagement will allow them to analyze and promote workable and effective agricultural best management practices and flood prevention strategies that can contribute to local resilience planning in these rural and under-resourced communities, and offer a model for other communities faced with persistent flooding.This CNH2-S project will ask four nested questions that interrogate the multi-scalar dynamic feedbacks between in-stream restoration practices, upland conservation measures, flood peaks, and community-level impacts of and responses to climate change: (1) How does more frequent and more intense flooding across the Upper Mississippi River Basin alter stream restoration practices in the study watersheds, linking or breaking the potential connection between restoration and resilience? (2) How do stream restoration practices, particularly changes in channel morphology, impact community-level climate vulnerability to flooding? (3) How do stream managers, flood decision makers, and landowners balance socio-environmental tradeoffs related to flood vulnerability and resilience across the reach and watershed scales? (4) Can iterative, multi-scalar hydrologic and hydraulic modeling be incorporated with qualitative and participatory approaches to support stakeholder-based flood resilience planning to enable social-ecological system (SES) transformations? The density of stream restoration projects in the Kickapoo and Coon Creek (WI) watersheds, coupled with long-term impacts and accelerating frequency of flood events and community interest in flood planning, will allow the research team to co-create knowledge with local partners that extends existing research in social-ecological systems (SES) resilience: heeding recent calls to offer empirical studies of community-level climate vulnerability and responses to climate change, while focusing on innovative linkages between restoration and resilience to consider new opportunities for SES transformations. The approach advances understandings of the complex responses of flood hydrology and hydraulics to multi-scalar flood management interventions, filling a significant gap by relating flood hydraulic and watershed hydrologic approaches to investigate how stream- floodplain restoration interacts and compares with upland practices to reduce flood peaks. This multi-scalar approach, with its grounding in stakeholder engagement mechanisms, offers a testable, methodologically innovative, partner-centered, resilience-focused systems approach to flood risk management that can advance resilience planning in the study watersheds and in other socio-environmental systems facing rapid and uncertain changes related to climate change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.