River restoration in the United States: the challenge of restoring reaches to manage catchments

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.