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A multiscale approach to balance trade-offs among dam infrastructure, river restoration, and cost.

ABSTRACT: Aging infrastructure and growing interests in river restoration have led to a substantial rise in dam removals in the United States. However, the decision to remove a dam involves many complex trade-offs. The benefits of dam removal for hazard reduction and ecological restoration are potentially offset by the loss of hydroelectricity production, water supply, and other important services. We use a multiobjective approach to examine a wide array of trade-offs and synergies involved with strategic dam removal at three spatial scales in New England. We find that increasing the scale of decision-making improves the efficiency of trade-offs among ecosystem services, river safety, and economic costs resulting from dam removal, but this may lead to heterogeneous and less equitable local-scale outcomes. Our model may help facilitate multilateral funding, policy, and stakeholder agreements by analyzing the trade-offs of coordinated dam decisions, including net benefit alternatives to dam removal, at scales that satisfy these agreements.

SUBMITTER: Roy SG

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6255187 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A multiscale approach to balance trade-offs among dam infrastructure, river restoration, and cost.

Roy Samuel G SG Uchida Emi E de Souza Simone P SP Blachly Ben B Fox Emma E Gardner Kevin K Gold Arthur J AJ Jansujwicz Jessica J Klein Sharon S McGreavy Bridie B Mo Weiwei W Smith Sean M C SMC Vogler Emily E Wilson Karen K Zydlewski Joseph J Hart David D

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20181105 47

Aging infrastructure and growing interests in river restoration have led to a substantial rise in dam removals in the United States. However, the decision to remove a dam involves many complex trade-offs. The benefits of dam removal for hazard reduction and ecological restoration are potentially offset by the loss of hydroelectricity production, water supply, and other important services. We use a multiobjective approach to examine a wide array of trade-offs and synergies involved with strategic ...[more]

PMID: 30397124

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Project description:Value-based decision-making involves trading off the cost associated with an action against its expected reward. Research has shown that both physical and mental effort constitute such subjective costs, biasing choices away from effortful actions, and discounting the value of obtained rewards. Facing conflicts between competing action alternatives is considered aversive, as recruiting cognitive control to overcome conflict is effortful. Moreover, engaging control to proactively suppress irrelevant information that could conflict with task-relevant information would presumably also be cognitively costly. Yet, it remains unclear whether the cognitive control demands involved in preventing and resolving conflict also constitute costs in value-based decisions. The present study investigated this question by embedding irrelevant distractors (flanker arrows) within a reversal-learning task, with intermixed free and instructed trials. Results showed that participants learned to adapt their free choices to maximize rewards, but were nevertheless biased to follow the suggestions of irrelevant distractors. Thus, the perceived cost of investing cognitive control to suppress an external suggestion could sometimes trump internal value representations. By adapting computational models of reinforcement learning, we assessed the influence of conflict at both the decision and learning stages. Modelling the decision showed that free choices were more biased when participants were less sure about which action was more rewarding. This supports the hypothesis that the costs linked to conflict management were traded off against expected rewards. During the learning phase, we found that learning rates were reduced in instructed, relative to free, choices. Learning rates were further reduced by conflict between an instruction and subjective action values, whereas learning was not robustly influenced by conflict between one's actions and external distractors. Our results show that the subjective cognitive control costs linked to conflict factor into value-based decision-making, and highlight that different types of conflict may have different effects on learning about action outcomes.

Project description:Dam removal is an increasingly important method of stream restoration, but most removal efforts are under-studied in their effects. In order to better understand the effects of such removals on the stream ecosystem, we examined changes in stream macroinvertebrate communities from 2011-2016. Comparisons were focused above, below, and before and after the October 2012 removal of the Brown Bridge Dam on the Boardman River in Michigan (USA), as well as to new channel sites created in its former reservoir (2013-2015). Using linear mixed-effect models on the percent abundance of ecologically sensitive taxa (% Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera (EPT)), total density of all macroinvertebrates, overall taxa richness, and Functional Feeding Groups, along with multivariate analyses on the community matrix, we examined differences in community composition among sites and years. EPT declined downstream of the dam immediately after dam removal, but recovered in the second year, becoming dominant within 2-4 years. Downstream sites before removal had different community composition than upstream sites and downstream sites after removal (p<0.001), while upstream and downstream sites after removal converged towards similarity. New channel (restored) %EPT, density, and taxa richness were not different from upstream sites in any year following removal, but new channel sites were the most distinct in community composition, possessing multiple indicator taxa characteristic of unique new conditions. The invasive New Zealand mud snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) was absent from all sites prior to dam removal, but appeared at low densities in upstream sites in 2013, had spread to all sites by 2015, and showed large increases at all sites by 2016. Managers employing dam removal for stream restoration should include post-removal monitoring for multiple years following removal and conduct risk analysis regarding potential effects on colonization of invasive invertebrate species.

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Dataset Information

A multiscale approach to balance trade-offs among dam infrastructure, river restoration, and cost.

Publications

A multiscale approach to balance trade-offs among dam infrastructure, river restoration, and cost.

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