The resilience of a multi-stakeholder, socio-ecological system is complex and dynamic. The adaptive nature of different components of the river basin helps reorganize the system to a new state after a perturbance. Umatilla River Basin (URB) is a drought-prone basin lying in a semiarid region of Northeastern Oregon. In this study, we used the previously identified indicators for the resilience to climate change induced drought in URB based on the key stakeholders, adaptive cycles, interactions, and thresholds for change. A conceptual model for the resilience of URB to drought was used to formulate the drought resilience index (DRI), which uses both qualitative and quantitative indicators. DRI is assessed as a function of six categories: pressure, predictability, natural capital, economic capital, social capital, and risk attitude. The indicators are first normalized, averaged per category, and the categories are assigned equal weight to compute five classes of resilience: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. DRI is computed at two levels: zonal level and basin-wide. This presentation will include results on drought resilience, including resilience class map for 4 zones in URB and radar charts for the six resilience categories at zonal levels. The division of DRI into six categories of indicators helps us understand the drivers of resilience in the river basin and provides guidance for drought mitigation, planning and management efforts to enhance the long-term resilience of the basin to climate change induced droughts in URB.
Keywords: Resilience, Drought, Umatilla, Socio-ecological System
.jpg "Meghna Babbar-Sebens, Ph.D. photo")