Year of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Science (MS)

Degree Name

Forestry

Other Degree Name/Area of Focus

Society and Conservation

Department or School/College

W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation

Committee Chair

Brian Chaffin

Commitee Members

Marco Maneta, Anna Klene

Keywords

Water policy, Instream flow, Montana, Water rights

Subject Categories

Geographic Information Sciences | Natural Resources Management and Policy | Water Law | Water Resource Management

Abstract

The state-level institutions governing water use in the western United States have increasingly come under pressure and scrutiny related to their inability to navigate water use conflicts in recent decades. Rapid population growth and shifting public values towards leaving water instream for recreational and environmental purposes pose challenges to Montana water supplies which are predominantly allocated for irrigated agriculture. Additionally, while water scarcity and unpredictable availability are not new dilemmas in Montana, the rate at which climate change is driving shifts in the distribution, timing, and availability of water supplies is unprecedented. Current water policies may not be nimble enough to adjust in a timely manner to the challenges of shifting demands and uncertain water supplies. In Montana, prior appropriation provides assurances of priority water use to the first-in-time users of water and has tended to favor extractive uses such as mining and irrigation over newer uses such as instream flow for fisheries and recreation. To address these challenges, this thesis leverages a spatial dataset of Montana water rights to investigate the intersection of irrigation water rights and instream flow rights, assess Montana’s current instream flow program, and explore how water rights data can be used to gauge the potential efficacy of innovative instream flow programs. This analysis identified the large scope and scale of currently unmet instream flow water rights across the state and pointed out many areas of potential conflict between instream flow and agriculture. In so doing, this research highlights the ineffectiveness of top-down regulatory approaches to instream flow and a need to focus on site-specific or watershed-scale water conservation programs to augment instream flows. Furthermore, this thesis produced a framework for using publicly-available water rights data to identify the potentially most influential water rights to target for new instream flow leasing programs such as short-term or split-season water leasing. The Flint Creek Basin was used as a case study to apply this approach, but it could be applied to any basin throughout the state.

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© Copyright 2020 Anna Leigh Crockett