Staying afloat: in changing times, a water facility management tool keeps operations from sinking.

The Auburn State Recreation Area in California, and its famed Middle Fork and North Fork of the American River has prime whitewater rafting areas and is also home to facilities for camping, hiking, swimming, boating and fishing. But the popularity of the area and its diverse uses has spawned considerable competition and conflict among its different types of users. The area is a good example of a place where a facility management tool could be effective for easing competition and recognizing all user needs. Recently, in the effort to address concerns like these, the Bureau of Land Reclamation created the Water Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (WROS) System, a facilities management tool for field workers.

The example at the Auburn recreation area shows a trend in varied uses of water facilities. Fifty years ago, when a person said they were going camping, fishing or boating, it was clear what the person intended. Today, due to many factors, such as new technology and equipment, more facilities and diverse public tastes and preferences have resulted in many types of camping, fishing and boating. For example, these activities can range from bellyboats to two-story, 110-foot long houseboats; from snorkeling and diving to parasailing; from kayaks to jet skis; from reading a book along the shoreline to competing in a professional bass tournament; from two-person tents to the use of modern recreation vehicles.

Managers have discovered that water recreation management is no longer a simple matter of building a boat ramp, dock, parking area or bathhouse. They are challenged by complex, and often contentious, recreation allocation decisions involving competing recreation uses and users. Managers also realize that they cannot provide all the recreation opportunities the public wants, and thus, they need to fit within and contribute to a larger regional and national system of diverse water recreation opportunities.

Several principles have emerged which are very transparent at most lakes, rivers and beaches in America:

* The "average" visitor does not exist

* We cannot be all things to all people at one place

* We need to ensure and conserve recreation diversity

* We need to build a system of water recreation opportunities

The challenge for the Bureau of Reclamation was taking these principles to develop a management utility tool for field personnel. The WROS System is a result of a four-year effort to produce such a tool. The Bureau of Reclamation, with support of the Federal Lakes Recreation Leadership Council and hundreds of water resource managers, completed the development of the WROS system in 2004.

The system's development aids management problems like that at Auburn State Recreation Area. There, WROS is helping the stakeholders to look beyond their diverse activity interests and see that they often share a common interest with others in terms of the type of recreation experience they prefer for certain areas. The system is being used in developing the resource management plan and environmental impact statement for this state recreation area.

Wayne Woodroof of the California Department of Parks and Recreation says that not only does WROS aid in the construction and management of local facilities, but helps with long-term planning for the whole California state park system.

This management and planning in California fits along with the WROS goal to provide managers with a framework and procedure for making better decisions for conserving a spectrum of high quality and diverse water recreation opportunities. Specifically, WROS was designed to assist in the inventory, planning and management of lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, estuaries, bays, rivers, tidal basins, coastal zone areas and marine protected areas, along with the surrounding land areas.

According to Vernon Lovejoy of the Bureau of Reclamation's Office of Policy, "WROS helps to sort out the increasing complexity challenging managers of water resources and helps improve decision making."

The WROS System

The WROS System is a model that uses a recreation area's characteristics to define it in order to determine how to manage it. The model is based on a several overarching principles.

WROS defines a recreation opportunity based on the fact that recreation users not only seek recreation activities to participate in, but also specific recreation settings in order to enjoy a special kind of recreation experience and sub sequent benefits. Recreation professionals no longer simply manage activities, but also settings; they no longer simply manage to provide recreation activities, but manage to provide recreation experiences and benefits. They no longer simply consider the on-site visitor, but also the benefits that may accrue to a local community and landowners.

These four components (activities, setting, experience and benefits) constitute a recreation opportunity-the opportunity for a person to participate in a particular recreation activity or activities in a specific setting to enjoy a particular recreation experience and the benefits it affords. For example, one family might desire camping in a modern full-service campground on a lake in order to spend quality time with the family for rest and relaxation. Another family might desire camping in rural location where they can test their fishing skills, enjoy solitude and to see nature's beauty. Both families want to go camping, but in very different settings, leading to different kinds of experiences and benefits. Therefore, these families are seeking different kinds of recreation opportunities.

WROS also explains the type and location of six types of water-related recreation opportunities, otherwise known as WROS classes. The spectrum of recreation opportunities have a range of urban, suburban, rural developed, rural natural, semi-primitive and primitive. Each WROS class is defined by a particular "package" of activities, setting attributes, experiences and benefits.

Inventory

The system enables a water resource to be inventoried and mapped for its current or existing recreation opportunities. The mapping uses an inventory protocol and the expert-opinion of agency managers and stakeholders familiar with the past and current recreation situation. The inventory protocol is a printed booklet with 15 attributes in three categories that are rated at each inventory site on a lake. The WROS inventory is typically conducted by the team in a boat or a helicopter.

The WROS inventory stage uses the rule of a sliding scale of analysis. Level one is considered a modest level of analysis, level two an ordinary level, and level three is extraordinary. The greater the possibility that a decision may significantly alter natural or heritage resources, local economies, water operations or the quality of the recreation opportunity, the greater likelihood that a level 3 analysis would be appropriate. The level one WROS inventory for the 12,500-acre New Melones Lake in California required one day of analysis with a small group of knowledgeable staff, whereas a level three inventory might require five days with a larger group of agency personnel and key stakeholders.

Planning

An important design criterion in developing WROS was that it would be compatible with any agency or private sector planning process, and not just the Bureau of Reclamation's planning process. WROS brings recreation information into an organization's planning process in order to develop future management direction and justify actions.

The WROS inventory produces a map and descriptive information which details the current recreation situation, which then can serve as the recreational input into the inventory stage of whatever planning process is being used. From understanding the current recreation situation, WROS helps planners to develop reasonable alternatives, analyze tradeoffs and benefits among alternatives and visually depict the alternatives more clearly to improve public understanding and input.

Management

WROS contains management guidelines for more than 150 attributes often found in water recreation settings and a set of boating capacity ranges for each of the six WROS classes.

Darrell Welch of the Bureau of Reclamation's Technical Service Center says that information like that is invaluable to facility managers, citing a pressing example. "Boating in America is exploding and creating unwanted conflicts between boaters as well as other flat water recreation users," Welch says. "WROS provides a systematic, logical and defensible way to make reasonable decisions about boating capacities."

There are other practical management uses from WROS. For example, by understanding the type and location of the WROS classes that an area is being managed to provide, a manager can improve visitor maps and brochures by displaying where recreation opportunities are available, explain rules and regulations more clearly for specific recreation opportunities, improve the clarity and detail of management goals and objectives, and better develop and justify annual operating plans and budgets.

Summary

WROS helps to sort out the increasing complexity facing managers of water resources and helps to improve decision making for recreation facility operators and planners. It is adaptive, flexible and practical, while building on judicial doctrine to improve legally defensible decision making. It relies on sound professional judgment to inventory, plan and manage water resources. More specifically, WROS is useful for:

* inventorying and mapping the current recreation opportunities

* helping tourists and recreationists choose where to recreate

* assessing the effects of proposed land use and water management changes

* improving public input and communication with stakeholders

* improving management efficiency and effectiveness

* improving regional inter-agency collaboration

* improving the defensibility of management decisions

* ensuring diversity of water-related recreation opportunities

There have been more than 100 field applications of WROS across the nation including water resources managed by the Bureau of Reclamation, Corps of Engineers, Tennessee Valley Authority, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, as well as parks in California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona.

The benefits of the program are already being seen. Steve Kellogg, vice president of URS, one of the world's largest engineering design firms, says that the WROS system is having a direct effect on the public. "WROS worked beautifully to help the public see what their recreation choices and options were in our planning process," Kellogg explains. "In return, the public was able to provide more meaningful and creative input back to us."

A copy of the WROS User's Guidebook is available on line at www.usbr.gov/pmts/ planning/wros/index.html. Other helpful teaching and training items include CD copies of the guidebook, large WROS posters useful for public workshops and open houses or for internal staff training purposes, and a variety of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

Web extra: Find out more about WROS classifications and where your facility fits in.

www.nrpa.org/par

By Dr. Glenn E. Haas, Ph.D., and Robert Aukerman, Ph.D.

The 15 Attributes of WROS Classes

Physical attributes     Managerial attributes   Social attributes

Degree of development   Degree of management    Degree of visitor
                        presence                presence

Sense of closeness      Degree of public        Degree of
to urban setting        access facilities       non-recreational use

Degree of resource      Degree of developed     Degree of visitor
modification            recreation facilities   concentration

Distance to             Degree of visitor       Degree of diverse
development on or       services and            recreation activities
adjacent to water       conveniences
resource

Degree of natural                               Degree of visitor
ambiance                                        comforts

                                                Degree of
                                                solitude/remoteness