Confounded by forgotten legacies: Effectively managing watersheds in the contemporary age of unknown unknowns

Contemporary watershed management practices can reflect oversimplifications of relationships between anthropogenic pressures and resource degradation. Remediation and restoration efforts often focus on recent land use practices as the primary driver of hydrologic regime changes. We present a case study that serves as an example to the scientific and watershed management communities of the lasting influences of historic land use practices and natural physical processes on a stream in the central United States listed as impaired by the federal government. Abnormal spatiotemporal streamflow relationships, determined by means of an experimental watershed study, alerted the authors to possible sink/source behavior in the upper‐watershed. Subsequent research uncovered archival evidence of coal mining, which may provide at least partial explanation. Additional investigation identified hydrologic processes associated with natural landscape evolution, noted by early‐20th‐century researchers, which are considered in the context of the current water quality and flow regime. Despite best‐intended management practices, regulatory agencies, scientists, and local decision makers have not accounted for such practices and processes, instead relying on recent development as the proximate cause of designated impairment. We present argumentation that historic land use (coal mining) and landscape processes comprise cumulative yet unconsidered legacy effects that contribute systemically to the observed hydrologic regime of the watershed. Results hold important implications for contemporary watershed management, and support rethinking the case‐by‐case appropriateness of federal and state water impairment listings, and the achievability of restoration efforts in many developing watersheds.