A common long-term goal is to support freshwater ecosystems and associated ecosystem services, with environmental watering used as a tool to achieve that goal. Environmental watering is often designed on an event-by-event basis, where individual events are implemented to meet a specific short-term objective. The often-implicit assumption is that meeting short-term objectives will contribute to achieving long-term objectives. However, there is increasing evidence that this approach is not sufficient. One factor contributing to this failure may be that multiple vulnerabilities exist across a species’ life-history, creating multiple restraints that must be addressed. A restraint, in this context, arises when there is a misalignment between the life-history of an organism and its (flow-related) environment. For example, flow-related movement cues may be misaligned with breeding seasons in some fish species. Each misalignment potentially represents one of multiple restraints that prevent the achievement of long-term objectives.
We developed a framework that aims to improve managers’ capacity to achieve long-term outcomes from short-term environmental flows and prioritise flows within the flow regime. The framework does this by placing individual watering events in a multi-scale context, to identify and assess the importance of individual vulnerabilities. Our framework conceptually maps the life-history of the organism in space (e.g. upstream/downstream of a wetland) and time (e.g. intra-seasonal to multi-year) to identify where potential vulnerabilities lie. The framework therefore explicitly identifies multiple points at which long-term objectives can be derailed and provides a dynamic model of event prioritisation, where restraints that are alleviated naturally can be discounted, but those remaining are given higher priority. Also, the framework highlights multiple competing hypotheses regarding mechanisms influencing the achievement of ecological objectives, facilitating faster, more robust adaptive management. The implementation of such a framework would better facilitate the achievement of long-term ecological objectives using environmental flows.