Colorado is at the intersection of unprecedented challenges relating to population growth, water limitations, megafires, and climate change. The need for watershed restoration that enhances storage of water, sediment, and carbon is undeniable, but questions remain regarding the best ecosystem-based methods to achieve these goals. Sound, quantifiable methods are necessary to inform potential solutions to these relevant but onerous problems, and a multidisciplinary approach is essential to navigate through the uncertainties and contradictory hypotheses that currently obscure the best path forward. Balancing the needs of competing interests is difficult, but nearly everyone can agree that healthy and resilient hydro-systems and ecosystems are essential to sustaining our quality of life. Delivering a nature-based storage approach requires not only application of the best-available engineering and physical science, but also identifying (and later overcoming) barriers to innovation that are mostly associated with the social sciences in general, and water law, water rights, agricultural economics, and stakeholder attitudes and behaviors. Our stakeholders will be our harshest critics, and this work and their acceptance for implementation of these new methods is critical for implementation.  

Researchers and practitioners with extensive experience studying and implementing water resources projects in the natural environment comprise our team of watershed professionals. Our team understands that ensuring our research, designs, and monitoring efforts are relevant and useful rests not only on reliable quantification of water, sediment, and carbon capitals, but also on accounting for the associated uncertainties. The challenges we face with quantification are compounded by a widespread lack of absolute and relational data needed to inform our efforts. Our science provides us the capacity to explore the realm of the possible and modern approaches are data driven. We look forward to developing and delivering a feasible approach to quantifying the potential for nature-based solutions to the increasing need for water, sediment, and carbon storage. We all are members of larger teams adept at informing and implementing natural resources management and restoration programs that involve using natural infrastructure for water and sediment storage, sediment augmentation, and carbon sequestration, while quantifying and validating these approaches based on their financial, legal, ecological, and statistical significance.