Two approaches to ecological restoration planning, limiting-factors analysis and process-based restoration, are employed in efforts to recover endangered salmonid species throughout the Pacific Northwest of North America. Limiting-factors analysis seeks to identify physical limitations to fish production that may be addressed by habitat restoration; it is known as the "Field of Dreams" hypothesis (i.e., if you build it, they will come). Process-based restoration, in contrast, assumes that protection and/or restoration of watershed-scale processes will best achieve self-sustaining habitat features that support salmon populations. Two case studies from the Columbia River basin (northwestern USA) display current efforts to integrate these two restoration approaches to improve salmonid populations. Although these examples both identify site-specific habitat features to construct, they also recognize the importance of supporting key watershed processes to achieve restoration goals. The challenge in advancing the practice of restoration planning is not in simply acknowledging the conceptual benefits of process-based restoration while maintaining a traditional focus on enumerating site-specific conditions and identifying habitat-construction projects, but rather in following process-based guidance during recovery planning and, ultimately, through implementation of on-the-ground actions. We encourage a realignment of the restoration community to truly embrace a process-based, multi-scalar view of the riverine landscape.
Governmental mandates and public awareness have forced progressively smaller and less sophisticated agencies and organizations to initiate stream monitoring programs, particularly in urban and urbanizing areas. Yet many of these monitoring efforts lack either a coherent conceptual framework or appropriately chosen methods, and they rely on monitoring techniques that are simply infeasible for these institutional settings. We propose a monitoring strategy, and specific existing monitoring protocols, that will be useful for the management and rehabilitation of streams in urbanizing watersheds. A monitoring strategy must be developed by 1) identifying the management question(s) being addressed, 2) determining the institional level of effort required (and available) to effectively make particular kinds of measurements, and 3) identifying what specific parameters should and can be measured. Only a limited set of parameters show much utility or feasibility in addressing the most common management questions being faced by municipalities in urbanizing, humid-area regions of the United States. These include measures of riparian canopy, bank erosion and bank hardening, and in-stream large woody debris. With some additional expertise useful data can also be included on channel gradient, substrate composition, and pools. Nearly all of the other myriad parameters that have been measured historically on rivers and streams show little apparent value in these watershed and institutional settings.
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