General Discussion 



The "Summary of Conclusions" that fol- 

 lows this section is organized according to the 

 same major headings as used in the body of the 

 report. Within those headings we have either 

 brought forward the specific conclusions from 

 individual modules or combined them where 

 appropriate. 



The "Summary of Recommendations" rep- 

 resents a consensus of the study team leaders 

 related to the original objectives of the coopera- 

 tive program. Total agreement could not be 

 reached on all items. In these cases, we bowed 

 to the lead investigator for that topic. We origi- 

 nally planned to present the recommendations 

 in the same format as the rest of this report, but 

 it didn't work well for making recommenda- 

 tions. Therefore, we organized the recommen- 

 dations to start at the site where individual 

 practices take place, move to the watershed 

 level of cumulative effects, and then to the 

 general water quality and fisheries concerns. 



The land managers who are part of this 



cooperative were then asked to respond to the 

 "Summary of Recommendations" with the in- 

 tention that their responses would be published 

 as part of this document. 



The recommendations on monitoring are 

 offered as suggestions to be considered also in 

 the Flathead Basin Cooperative Monitoring Plan. 



As is true in many studies, by the time the 

 assigned work is completed, it becomes clear 

 that additional questions were raised during the 

 conduct of the study. Several of these are listed 

 as suggested studies. 



Some of the issues we addressed may re- 

 quire political decisions and a clear agreement 

 among multiple landowners in the same water- 

 shed as to competing objectives and acceptable 

 tradeoffs. Hopefully, we provided useful infor- 

 mation to help make difficult decisions regard- 

 ing the balance between competing and often 

 overlapping socio-economic and socio-envi- 

 ronmental concerns. 



Flathead Basin Cooperative Program Final Report 



Page 141 



