HR: 08:00h
AN: H11F-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: River restoration in the United States: the challenge of restoring reaches to manage catchments
AU: * Bernhardt, E S
EM: ebernhar@duke.edu
AF: Duke University, Department of Biology Box 91000, Durham, NC 27708 United States
AU: Palmer, M A
EM: palmer@cbl.umces.edu
AF: Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences P.O. Box 38, Solomons, MD 20688 United States
AU: Allan, J D
EM: dallan@umich.edu
AF: University of Michian, School of Natural Resources, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1115 United States
AU: Group, N W
EM: n/a
AF: NCEAS, 735 State Street, Suite 300 , Santa Barbara, CA 93101 United States
AB: The first comprehensive database on river restoration across the United States provides a new context for evaluating restoration status and trends nationally. Our synthesis of >37,000 project records indicates that river restoration projects and expenditures have increased exponentially over the past decade with more than a billion dollars spent annually since 1990. Most projects are intended to enhance water quality, manage riparian zones, and improve instream habitat. Less than 10% of project records document any form of project monitoring, and little if any of this information is either appropriate or available for assessing the ecological effectiveness of restoration activities. Followup surveys with project managers across the country suggest that while the proportion of projects is likely higher than 10%, there are often mismatches between project goals, implementation activities and project evaluation. To be ecologically successful, individual restoration projects must follow a more rigorous planning and evaluation process and ideally will lead to improved ecosystem attributes at the restoration site. Scaling up the impacts of individual restoration projects up to catchment and basin scales, requires coordinated and consistent project tracking and carefully targeted monitoring efforts to evaluate restoration effectiveness. In this talk we will briefly summarize the results of the national synthesis, and move on to discuss opportunities for evaluating restoration success at scales larger than the individual project.
UR: http://nrrss.umd.edu/
DE: 0458 Limnology (1845, 4239, 4942)
DE: 0478 Pollution: urban, regional and global (0345, 4251)
DE: 0481 Restoration
DE: 0496 Water quality
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005