Applying Riverscape Health Principles and Remote Assessment Techniques to Characterize Physical and Biological Conditions and Recovery Potential

Streams and riverine landscapes, or riverscapes, are composed of the river channel, connected floodplain, and biotic communities that together make up the valley bottom and maintain the physical and biological processes vital to river health. Rapid development within those riverscapes along with a changing climate influence water and land use that are impairing existing conditions and driving evolutionary changes. Those drivers are impacting riverscape health in an unprecedented way. Conserving and restoring riverscapes requires assessing riverscape health over a broad range of spatial scales, including watershed, planning segments, and reaches. Assessments of hydrogeomorphic and ecological characteristics and behavior of riverscapes provide critical information about their health and evolutionary trajectory. Watershed-scale contextual attributes provide a basin-scale characterization of the physiographic and topographic setting, and anthropogenic impacts affecting geomorphic and biological functions that can inform restoration planning and riverscape management. Geospatial analyses guided by riverscape health principles inform what constitutes healthy, functioning riverscapes. Coupled with novel GIS tools, riverscape health studies at the watershed- and riverscape-scales provide objective methods to describe the main properties of drainage basins using an appropriate set of indicators and associated metrics. This presentation will provide a summary of those methods and tools applied via a remote assessment effort that studied a large watershed in Colorado. The study examined the influence of riverscape health drivers and natural and anthropogenic stressors have on the physical condition and recovery potential of those riverscapes. The outcome of this study will advance the scientific basis underlying applied riverscape management and broad-scale restoration and conservation planning. By identifying the correlations in hydrologic, geomorphic, ecologic, and water management parameters, researchers and managers can begin to understand and decipher multi-causal mechanisms and trends that influence the physical condition and potential recovery of degraded riverscapes.