Water withdrawals to cities, farms, and other offstream uses in the United States have increased over ten-fold during the twentieth century in response to tremendous population and economic growth. Further rapid growth in population and income is almost certain to occur, placing additional demands on water supplies. As withdrawals to offstream users increase, more water is consumed, leaving less water in streams. Streamflows have dropped at the same time as additional instream uses have been found by scientists studying the needs of aquatic plants and wildlife and the hydro-geologic...

This report was produced with two objectives in mind. First, we sought to provide a nationwide assessment based on relatively good quality, consistent data, which could serve as a point of reference for pending decisions about agency watershed condition assessment. Second, we hoped to offer information that would be useful in making broad-scale decisions about where more in-depth assessment would be most helpful. Our end products-this report and its associated spreadsheets of data and metrics of risk to watershed condition-offer a great deal of information about nearly 3700 5th-level...

The method of paired comparisons is used to measure individuals' preference orderings of items presented to them as discrete binary choices. This paper reviews the theory and application of the paired comparison method, describes a new computer program available for eliciting the choices, and presents an analysis of methods for scaling paired choice data to estimate an interval scale measure of preference. A new procedure for isolating an individual's inconsistent choices is described. Using data from five empirical studies, the reliability of respondents' paired choices is assessed using...