Strategic Design and Delivery of Integrated Catchment Restoration Monitoring: Emerging Lessons from a 12-Year Study in the UK

Abstract

Despite growing interest in river and catchment restoration, including a focus on nature-based solutions, assessing effectiveness of restoration programmes continues to prove a challenge. The development of the Eddleston Water project, the Scottish Government’s empirical study of the impact of implementing natural flood management measures on flood risk and habitat restoration, provides the opportunity to review restoration monitoring at a strategic and operational level for this long-running catchment restoration programme. The project has implemented an extensive range of restoration measures along the river and across the 69 km2 catchment. This paper reviews the monitoring strategy and assesses both how the monitoring network developed meets its strategic aims and what subsequent changes were made in monitoring design and implementation. Covering hydrology, hydromorphology and ecology, we explore how all three are integrated to provide a comprehensive assessment of restoration success. Lessons to help inform other river rehabilitation monitoring programmes include the importance of a scoping study and capturing the full range of environmental variables pre-restoration; the limitations of BACI designs; and the need to focus integrated monitoring on a process-based framework and impact cascade, whilst also covering the full trajectory of recovery.

The impacts of within-stream physical structure and riparian buffer strips on semi-aquatic bugs in Southeast Asian oil palm

“…In contrast, the lack of clear differences that we found in most factors ("StreamPC1" -"StreamPC3") forming stream physical structure between streams with and without riparian buffer strips indicates that, in general, the presence of riparian buffer strips does not have significant impacts on within-stream physical structure. This could be because the influences of wider catchment properties, including management in the wider oil palm landscape, on stream conditions are more pervasive than maintaining buffer strips or not, necessitating Before-After Control-Impact (BACI) studies to assess the effects of entire catchments (Spray et al, 2022). Additionally, it could because the riparian buffers in this study were not able to protect streams from the influence of chemical runoff or erosion from the surrounding agricultural landscape (Xu et al, 2023;Harianja et al, 2023b).…”

The ecohydrology of rewilding: A pressing need for evidence in the restoration of upland Atlantic salmon streams

“…Hitherto, most river restoration schemes in the UK have been reach‐scale demonstration sites where rivers have been re‐engineered over a kilometre or so and their riparian zones enhanced (e.g., Spray et al, 2022). These are usually agricultural or urban streams that have been heavily degraded historically by drainage and channelisation and they are improved by restoring previous features (e.g., reinstating meanders, reducing channel gradients), diversifying in‐stream habitat (e.g., reinstating pools, installing woody debris), and creating riparian buffer zones (e.g., by tree planting).…”

Nature-based solutions for floods AND droughts AND biodiversity: Do we have sufficient proof of their functioning?

“…Such monitoring data is scarce at the scale of single implemented measures (Zabret and Šraj, 2015) let alone collecting monitoring data to validate processes on the scale of an entire catchment. However, for watershed management and planning, it is essential to understand how individual locally implemented NbS interact at the wider landscape scale (Spray et al, 2022). Specifically, how can NbS for improved sponge functioning jointly contribute to the overall reduction and delay in flood peaks and volumes during wet seasons as well as the improvement of base flows and ground water levels during dry seasons.…”