Dam removals in the public eye: Effective outreach and GIS visualization

Restoration of river ecosystems may be contentious and polarizing: local residents faced with river management decisions such as dam removal may have deep concerns about large-scale landscape change, and fear the consequences to their communities. Finding a way to help citizens, elected officials, and practitioners visualize future landscapes is critical to the success of such projects. American Rivers, a national conservation organization, has been facilitating small dam removals across the country for ten years, but now also addresses much larger projects targeting salmon recovery. In 2009, the largest U.S. dam removal ever undertaken will begin on Washington’s Elwha River. We employ a range of tools and techniques to ensure public understanding of the benefits of a restored river and effects on the quality of life: 1) Using photo-realistic 3d GIS visualization, we depict the Elwha landscape before, during, and after dam removal to portray infrastructure deconstruction coupled with environmental restoration; at meetings, stakeholders can navigate over various sites before and after deconstruction, and personally explore the changes to riparian terrain; 2) Excerpts from model landscapes are captured as digital movies, time-lapse animations, and still images for use in public awareness and media campaigns; 3) Outreach work with local clubs, citizens’ groups, and businesses seeks to highlight the potential ecological and societal benefits of river restoration; 4) A traveling exhibit produced in conjunction with Olympic National Park interprets the project and river history for regional residents; 5) A working scale-model stream table acquired from the Nat’l Center for Earth-surface Dynamics is used by local science educators allowing school groups to experiment with dam removal. Collectively, such a range of approaches is necessary both to highlight the facets of large, multi-year restoration projects and to reach the broadest possible audience.