The Partnership for Coastal Watersheds is a collaborative community coalition guided by a diverse group of civic-minded citizens and technical advisors. Geographically focused on areas surrounding the Coos estuary, their mission is to collaborate to understand local watershed conditions and address their capacity and resiliency to serve ecological, economic, and social needs for present and future generations.

Recently the Partnership for Coastal Watersheds has focused on helping local jurisdictions gain access to the information they need in order to modernize and revise the Coos Bay Estuary Management Plan (CBEMP), which provides the regulatory basis for conservation and development decisions in the Coos estuary. They are doing this by applying a triple bottom line lens (economic, social, and environmental) to portray current conditions and uses in the estuary and provide recommendations to local governments to improve estuarine and shoreland management.

Products include:

• Coos Estuary Land Use Analysis: An integrated assessment report that evaluates options for local government jurisdictions to determine the best process for moving forward with a plan revision. The report includes a set of focus group recommendations, a matrix weighing management options by various evaluation criteria, and a framework for local governments to integrate new information into existing plans.
• Communities, Lands & Waterways Data Source: An encyclopedic compilation of all available data describing socioeconomic and environmental conditions in the area.
• Coos Estuary and Shoreland Atlas: A series of maps/tables analyzing current natural resource, hazards, and socio-economic data. This consists of a geodatabase and report with large format maps.
• A Community Planning Lessons Learned Guide: Summarizing successes, considerations, and obstacles in revising land use plans.
• CBEMP Audit: Evaluates the current plan to assess where legal framework may have changed, implications of any legal decisions that occurred since the plan was adopted, and general usability of the plan.

Other projects guided by the Partnership for Coastal Watersheds include:

• A Community Vision, which articulates the community’s ideal environmental and socio-economic conditions in 20 years
• A State of the Watersheds assessment which characterizes status and trends of environmental attributes and socio-economic conditions in the project area; and
• An Action Plan which describes what the community can do to address the environmental and socio-economic conditions that impede progress towards the community vision

Authored by Jennifer Schmitt, Watershed Monitoring Coordinator, South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve 2019