A questionnaire with 47 ideas for furthering integrated watershed management was rated by 54 of the 350 members of the Watershed Management Council. The ideas were solicited through the newsletters of the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts and the Watershed Management Council. Ideas were submitted by 14 people These were rewritten as short declarative statements that paraphrase the original submission.
The poll should be considered to be a survey of highly motivated wildlands researchers and managers, and not a statistically valid representation of the views of the WMC membership. However, a survey of motivated members is valid for WMC Board of Directors agenda development, because a volunteer organization without major funding may undertake only those issues to which volunteers are willing to contribute their time.
The raters found the ideas submitted to be generally good. All of the mean ratings were in the upper half of the scoring range. he scores of some of the proposals were bimodal due to diversity of opinion. Therefore a rating method that favored consensus was used. The question as to whether there should be another poll before the next biennial conference was answered affirmatively by 55 percent of the respondents. Most of those commenting on the poll would have preferred fewer questions, more explanation, less jargon, and no buzzwords. Some of the idea statements were found to overlap. Other ideas were considered inseparable. Several respondents recommended professional survey design in order to assure validity of results.
The raters and the submitters of ideas are most interested in getting on with watershed management or persuading others to do so. there were 21 research ideas submitted. Of these, 6 would result in new knowledge in physical (3) and social (3) sciences. The remaining 15 are related to the justification, design, or implementation of watershed management projects. The 4 top rated proposals for each of the 3 categories follow.
