Informing stream protection and restoration to maintain watershed resilience.
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Water resource managers are faced with the challenge of managing multiple, interacting, near and long-term threats, with limited resources. For example, aquatic biota and watersheds are exposed to more frequent extreme weather events, warming temperatures, and changing hydrologic patterns. Protection and restoration are two prevalent strategies in stream ecosystem management. The challenge with both is identifying and prioritizing sites where protection efforts and restoration activities will be effective in the long term to ensure watershed resilience. We use the Puget Lowlands and Willamette Valley ecoregions (Figure 1) as our study area to test a prioritization approach that also considers long-term resilience in the watershed.