Stream restoration

Robinson Creek in Boonville, California, had highly eroded stream banks prior to initiation of a stream restoration project.

Stream restoration or river restoration, also sometimes referred to as river reclamation, is work conducted to improve the environmental health of a river or stream, in support of biodiversity, recreation, flood management and/or landscape development.[1]

Stream restoration approaches can be divided into two broad categories: form-based restoration, which relies on physical interventions in a stream to improve its conditions; and process-based restoration, which advocates the restoration of hydrological and geomorphological processes (such as sediment transport or connectivity between the channel and the floodplain) to ensure a stream's resilience and ecological health.[2][3] Form-based restoration techniques include deflectors; cross-vanes; weirs, step-pools and other grade-control structures; engineered log jams; bank stabilization methods and other channel-reconfiguration efforts. These induce immediate change in a stream, but sometimes fail to achieve the desired effects if degradation originates at a wider scale. Process-based restoration includes restoring lateral or longitudinal connectivity of water and sediment fluxes and limiting interventions within a corridor defined based on the stream's hydrology and geomorphology. The beneficial effects of process-based restoration projects may sometimes take time to be felt since changes in the stream will occur at a pace that depends on the stream dynamics.[4]

Despite the significant number of stream-restoration projects worldwide, the effectiveness of stream restoration remains poorly quantified, partly due to insufficient monitoring.[5][6] However, in response to growing environmental awareness, stream-restoration requirements are increasingly adopted in legislation in different parts of the world.

  1. ^ "What is river restoration, and how to do it?". Utrecht, Netherlands: European Centre for River Restoration. Archived from the original on 2014-10-07. Retrieved 2014-09-19.
  2. ^ Bernhardt, Emily S.; Palmer, Margaret A. (2011). "River restoration: the fuzzy logic of repairing reaches to reverse catchment scale degradation". Ecological Applications. 21 (6): 1926–1931. Bibcode:2011EcoAp..21.1926B. doi:10.1890/10-1574.1. PMID 21939034.
  3. ^ Wohl, Ellen; Lane, Stuart N.; Wilcox, Andrew C. (2015). "The science and practice of river restoration". Water Resources Research. 51 (8): 5974–5997. Bibcode:2015WRR....51.5974W. doi:10.1002/2014WR016874.
  4. ^ "Restoration Monitoring". Rockville, MD: Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection (MCDEP). Retrieved 2017-10-10.
  5. ^ Roni, Phil; Hanson, Karrie; Beechie, Tim (2008). "Global review of the physical and biological effectiveness of stream-habitat rehabilitation techniques". North American Journal of Fisheries Management. 28 (3): 856–890. Bibcode:2008NAJFM..28..856R. doi:10.1577/M06-169.1.
  6. ^ Beechie, Timothy J.; Sear, David A.; Olden, Julian D.; Pess, George R.; Buffington, John M.; Moir, Hamish; Roni, Philip; Pollock, Michael M. (2010). "Process-based principles for restoring river ecosystems" (PDF). BioScience. 60 (3): 209–222. doi:10.1525/bio.2010.60.3.7. S2CID 2659531.