It is necessary to develop a common understanding of the fundamental principles of riparian areas among the people that work and live along the streambanks and shorelines of the Owasco Lake Watershed. Modern efforts at naturalizing and restoring streams would especially benefit from such an understanding.      To successfully co-exist with Owasco Lake, we must better understand the consequences of our actions on its tributaries. For purposes of home building, road construction, flood control, farming, and erosion control, Dutch Hollow Brook has been straightened, separated from its floodplains, deepened, over-widened, lined with foreign materials, steepened, diverted, and altered. Some of these works have resulted in major continuing maintenance problems, have decreased the Brook's natural function and stability, and have a high risk for failure. Many of the natural resource values of the Brook have been impaired.      In a time of many valid and competing uses for public and private investment, it is important to understand: the interrelated processes which shape the dimension and pattern of a modern stream, and the predictable adjustment of streams to their most probable stable form.      Thousands of dollars have been spent along Dutch Hollow Brook to improve roadways, flood control, crop fields, fish habitat, and streambank stability. Streams or rivers rarely exhibit the same form and structure throughout their length, or from watershed to watershed. Yet natural resource managers continue to impose generic designs to meet site-specific goals.

     Economic and environmental well being demands that the landowners, farmers, forestry workers, conservationists, engineers, scientists, and public policy makers who manage watershed resources provide high quality resource values in a cost-effective manner. Such a challenge is not new. These problems must be solved with improved techniques, new information, and better understanding of the stream.