In the Seattle metropolitan region, decades of urban growth have culminated in the federal listing of the Puget Sound Chinook and several other species of salmon. The listing requires urban and regional planners to address the degradation of salmon habitat in Puget Sound streams by including scientific and social considerations in the framing of policies and regulations. Two central issues are relevant for managing urban streams under the mandates of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). First, is the assessment and inclusion of key scientific findings that relate factors of development to degradation of habitat. Second, planning agencies must involve the local citizens to develop and, ultimately, support plans to safeguard impaired waters. To accomplish this, urban planners must garner support from elected officials to ensure that adequate budgets and legislation is available for addressing plan implementation. At its core, the urban planning process involves multiple agencies working with the best available information to implement plans that satisfy local citizens and public officials. Management strategies for protecting salmon habitat have encountered formidable obstacles when applied to watersheds in the Puget Sound metropolitan region. There exist limitations in the availability of appropriate scientific information, in particular scientific information that applies to urban areas. In a review of the scientific studies used by urban planners conducted by the author in collaboration with others, we found that analyses of watersheds and local riparian zones are based in areas where few, if any, human inhabitants reside (Francis et. al., 2005; Mills et al. 2005). While research on non-urban streams has emphasized the importance of ‘best management practices’ (BMPs) such as vegetated buffers, urban areas contain physical impediments (i.e. buildings, walkways, etc.) and human activities (i.e. gardening, pruning, re-vegetation, etc.) that preclude the application of BMPs along all portions of the steam channel. Moreover, physical features such as roads, power-lines, and landscaping practices break the connectivity of vegetation commonly associated to riparian corridors with limited human interference. As a result, in areas where riparian buffering is not possible information about the influence of up-land vegetation connectivity becomes essential to watershed managers charged with protecting degradation of aquatic resources. Another limitation regarding the availability of appropriate science for addressing issues relevant to aquatic habitats concerns the lack of studies addressing the interactions of mechanisms that operate at multiple scales. Investigations into what modifications at the landscape scale interact with local effects of land use to impact the riparian zone need further development (Wang et al, 1997; Roy et al. 2005). To date, the majority of catchment-scale studies has only indirectly indicated tradeoffs, as in the common finding that biological metrics are negatively associated with developed land in the catchment but positively associated with forested land in the riparian area (Steedman, 1988; Wang et al., 2001). Estimates of total developed land or total impervious surface do not address evidence that the location, distribution, and configuration of watershed features influences stream condition (Alberti, et al. 2004). The same can be said for the relationship between the composition and distribution of riparian vegetation and maintaining sufficient habitat for aquatic organisms. While the importance of social preference in determining the condition of corridor vegetation has been discussed in the literature (Lant and Roberts, 1990; Nassauer, et. al., 2001) there also exists a disconnect between the scientific basis for habitat protection, preference for riparian vegetation by streamside residents, and application of policies that utilize information from both. A review of the literature suggests that policies aimed at protecting streams fail to incorporate both the scientific basis of watershed integrity (Pedersen et al., 1992; Osbourne and Kovacic, 1993; Allan and Flecker, 1993; Dunaway et. al., 1994), and the social values of watershed residents (Zube et al., 1975; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1982; Brown and Harris, 1998; Nassauer et. al., 2001). Especially in ‘human dominated ecosystems’ such as the PSL, managing areas with diverse private property holdings (e.g. over 73% of streamside channels in the PSL are zoned Single-Family-Resident and privately owned), and a multiplicity of resident activities along the stream channel (e.g. fertilizing, landscaping, recreation) requires an understanding of the constellation of factors that influence landowner willingness to conserve and create riparian forests, and society’s general preference for the best policies for reforesting riparian lands. Given these gaps in the best available information, a central question emerges and defines the over-arching question for this study: how can urban ecological information in conjunction with preferences of watershed residents be used to aid urban planners in developing watershed management strategies?