Seeking river restoration appraisal best practice: supporting wider national and international environmental goals

Abstract

With growing investment in river restoration, we increasingly need to justify costs by demonstrating success and wider benefits of measures. To aid practitioners, the UK River Restoration Centre has worked with experts to develop a practical monitoring guidance that links objectives to specific monitoring to demonstrate achievable outcomes. Feedback, however, via an online questionnaire highlighted the need to rationalise the guidance contents for a new growing audience, taking advantage of new developments and incorporating the evaluation of social and economic aspects of river restoration. With these potential improvements, it is hoped that practitioners will follow this guidance, improve the quality of monitoring undertaken and share evidence of success and lessons learnt. This paper outlines how this guidance has been adopted as best practice. We discuss why we need to embed this guidance into wider monitoring protocols that can feed into national and international environmental policy and targets.

Evidence of Taxonomic and Functional Recovery of Macroinvertebrate Communities Following River Restoration

“…Our analyses indicate that improvements in habitat conditions can offset the negative ecological effects of coarser-scale environmental pressures; for example, a greater range of habitats can alleviate the ecological implications of hydrological extremes through providing refuges [74][75][76]. Such findings indicate the importance of applying a BACI approach to river restoration appraisals to place ecological responses within the context of catchment-wide processes and assess biological recovery trends over time relative to non-restored sites [7,30,64].…”

“…With logistical issues and limited financial resources available to undertake scientific assessment of restoration effectiveness, targeted appraisals or demonstration projects can be used to assess hydromorphological and ecological responses, which could in turn guide other restoration activities [29,30]. Barrier removal is a well-established restoration technique that aims to enhance longitudinal connectivity to restore natural processes [31][32][33].…”

Assessing the progress of river restoration in the UK: has ecological condition improved over two decades of intervention?

“…Where ecological condition is taken into account measures are often limited to single processes or features, such as vegetation structure and continuity (de Sosa et al 2018). As such, the full complexity of ecosystems are rarely assessed (England et al 2019).…”

“…Of these records, only 10% included any mention of monitoring (Bernhardt et al 2005), and little information was found related to the ecological effectiveness of restoration (Palmer et al 2007). Similarly, of more than 5,000 river restoration projects recorded in the UK National River Restoration Inventory (NRRI), only 21% of records indicated that follow-up monitoring and assessment of existing projects has been undertaken (England et al, 2019), and where monitoring had been undertaken, results were often inconsistent (Smith et al 2014).…”

Assessing the progress of river restoration in the UK: Has biophysical condition improved over two decades of intervention?

“…Of these records, only 10% included any mention of monitoring (Bernhardt et al, 2005), and little information was found related to the ecological effectiveness of restoration . Similarly, of more than 5,000 river restoration projects recorded in the UK National River Restoration Inventory (NRRI), only 21% of records indicated that follow-up monitoring and assessment of existing projects have been undertaken (England, Naura, Mant, & Skinner, 2019), and where monitoring had been undertaken, results were often inconsistent (Smith, Clifford, & Mant, 2014). Despite these limitations, Vaughan and Ormerod (2010) suggest there is considerable value in analysing large regional or national datasets as the size, geographic and temporal spread of the data, are likely to overcome many of the weaknesses associated with data quality.…”