Panel Focus:
From 1993-2001, the Interior Secretary Babbitt and his team worked at the cutting edge of developing some of the most unique large-scale restoration programs in the United States. The “big four” programs – the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program; the Trinity River Restoration Program; the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program; and the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program – became a laboratory for adaptive governance structures and attempts at adaptive management. Still relevant today, the successes and failures of these programs are seen as examples to emulate or avoid, and the lessons learned speak volumes about the future of large-scale restoration programs. Senior agency personnel and managers, decision-makers, science coordinators, and restoration program stakeholders will benefit from this high-level panel discussion.

Panel Focus:
This session presents a vigorous discussion about planning, implementation, and use of adaptive management for water system management and whether current approaches robust enough to handle addressing climate change impacts, which are expanding boundaries and uncertainties. System responses are often non-linear and characterized by underlying feedback mechanisms among ecosystem components. The panel will discuss whether the current application of adaptive management has the capacity to integrate the variability and extreme nature of climate change impacts, such as changing thermal conditions, changing intensity of precipitation and runoff events, increased variability of hydrology and unpredictable nature of winds and surges.

Panel Focus:
This panel session will review approaches to assess the ecological and economic benefits of habitat restoration, the utility of these assessments in advancing ecosystem based management, and the lessons these assessments can teach to guide future restoration. The complexity in assessing habitat value continues to increase due to a desire to quantify not only use or even abundance, but how restoration advances food web functioning, ecosystem-level productivity, and broader social and economic benefits. Evaluation of habitat restoration projects is more important than ever as projects now seek to provide protection from the effects of climate change and to enhance habitat for fish, other living resources, and community stakeholders. The ongoing shift to nature-based infrastructure and interest in achieving multiple societal and ecosystem service benefits is leading to new habitat science and assessment techniques. Panelists will discuss restoration monitoring and assessment approaches that quantify fish use, movement, and productivity, engage stakeholders and value ecosystem services. Panelists will also talk about how the results of this science can be incorporated into future restoration projects and fishery management. The session is relevant to modelers, researchers, and agency managers locally and nationally and can inform future restoration planning, designs, and monitoring.

Panel Focus:
Federal, state, and local public lands exist in a degraded state with inadequate funding for restoration and management. Since 2019 a national group of regulators, land managers, consultants, investors and mitigation bankers have explored the hurdles and solutions to compensatory mitigation on public lands. In this session, panelists will share a pending white paper, a series of case studies, and discuss why expediting an influx of private dollars on public lands is critical to local and global ecosystem recovery.

Panel Focus:
Participants will hear from those taking diverse approaches to grassland restoration leading efforts to coordinate landscape scale grassland restoration efforts in the central and western US. Presenters will share strategies they are using to increase coordination and address priority issues in their respective regions, and lessons learned from coordination within their region and between grassland biomes, so participants can implement them to improve coordination and outcomes of on-the-ground restoration and management activities in their regions of interest.

Panel Focus:
This session will take a broad look at urban restoration planning and design strategies and actions, with a focus on how they have changed over the last ten years. Panelists will provide perspectives on how restoration approaches transcend habitats at the landscape scale (e.g. from upland forest to coastal wetlands) while also interacting with dense urban development with studies in New York City, Miami and other urban areas and discussions to provide participants with actionable insights and tools to consider for their own cities.