Stream Restoration in the Southeast: Monitoring for Ecological Success

The National Riverine Science Synthesis (NRRSS) is a multi-year, interdisciplinary working group studying stream restoration throughout the United States, with concentrations in seven geographic nodes, including the Southeast (Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina). We have collected information about stream restoration projects in the US from diverse governmental and nongovernmental sources, building a database of 38,500 projects. The NRRSS database includes 852 projects from the Southeast, of which 27% indicate that they were monitored. South Carolina (47%) and North Carolina (36%) reported the highest percent of projects being monitored among the 50 states. In the second phase of NRRSS, we surveyed project managers for a subset of projects, to gather further information, including more in depth information about monitoring. Preliminary results suggest that the NRRSS summary database underestimated the amount of monitoring actually occurring in the Southeast. Much of this monitoring is being done to meet requirements for mitigation credit; thus the most commonly collected data are the mandated physical data, rather than data more useful in judging ecological success. While some monitoring done as research by academics has been published, monitoring data collected to obtain mitigation credit frequently has not. One of the goals of NRRSS is to encourage both collection of data necessary to evaluate ecological conditions and more extensive sharing of monitoring results to further the science of restoration ecology.