River Restoration in Victoria, Australia: Change is in the Wind, and None too Soon

Abstract

Stream restoration has become a multibillion dollar industry worldwide, yet there are few clear success stories and the scientific basis for effective stream restoration remains uncertain. We compiled data on completed river restoration projects from four management authorities in Victoria, Australia, to examine how the available data could inform the science of restoration ecology in rivers, and thus improve future restoration efforts. We found that existing data sources are limited and much historical information has been lost through industry restructuring and poor data archiving. Examining records for 2,247 restoration projects, we found that riparian management projects were the most common, followed by bank stabilization and in-stream habitat improvement. Only 14% of the project records indicated that some form of monitoring was carried out. It is evident that overall there is little scientific guidance and little or no monitoring and evaluation of the projects for which we had information. However, recent advances with mandatory, statewide reporting and an increased emphasis on project design and monitoring strongly suggest that the design, implementation, monitoring, and reporting of stream restoration projects have improved in recent years and will continue to do so.

A review of on-ground recovery actions for threatened freshwater fish in Australia

“…However, reported monitoring levels in the current study were considerably higher than the 10-14% published for general river-restoration projects (Bernhardt et al 2005;Brooks and Lake 2007), although the monitoring target (focal species, habitat, associated species) or type of monitoring (implementation: did we do what we said we would; intervention: how did our actions affect some parameter; surveillance: has river or fish-community condition changed) was not specified in the current review. In a review of 181 threatened-species recovery plans in the USA, Campbell et al (2002) found that 66-82% of plans had implemented at least one of their proposed monitoring tasks.…”

“…Riparian works are regularly identified as a popular management action in river restoration (Bernhardt et al 2005;Brooks and Lake 2007;Christian-Smith and Merenlender 2010) and, in the current study, ranked the eighth-commonest recovery action. The link between riparian works and recovery of particular threatened fish is sometimes tenuous, being more often a generic river-health activity; however, in the current study, riparian works were predominantly directed at Macquarie perch.…”

“…Much of the information on recovery actions are either unpublished, resides in the memory of practitioners, or is 'published' in agency project reports. This problem of limited availability or accessibility of management information is not unique to freshwaterfish recovery (Lintermans 2004;Brooks and Lake 2007;Price et al 2009) or Australia, with reviews of freshwater-habitat rehabilitation activities or threatened-species recovery in many countries reporting similar difficulties (see Abbitt and Scott 2001;Bernhardt et al 2005). The current inability to easily consolidate, synthesise and evaluate past attempts to recover freshwater fish hampers our capacity to advance recovery science and management.…”

Acid mine drainage and stream recovery: Effects of restoration on water quality, macroinvertebrates, and fish

“…Given the large effort expended on restoration, there are relatively few studies in the peer reviewed literature evaluating the success of restoration efforts (Brooks and Lake, 2007;Louhi et al, 2011). Furthermore, published studies of restoration often encompass only limited spatial and temporal scales (Palmer, 2009).…”

Benefits of riparian forest for the aquatic ecosystem assessed at a large geographic scale

“…Even so, riparian forests are generally acknowledged for their importance in river ecosystem functioning (Gregory et al, 1991), being closely linked to the hydromorphological quality of the river (Van Looy et al, 2008). Accordingly, re-plantation of river margins is the most widely applied restoration technique for rivers throughout Europe, Australia and the USA (Brooks and Lake, 2007;Palmer et al, 2007). Guidelines for these practices are not readily available and are mostly based on providing vegetative buffer strips and terrestrial migration corridors.…”