Advancing River Restoration and Management

This book offers a comprehensive overview of progress in the general area of fluvial remote sensing with a specific focus on its potential contribution to river management. The book highlights a range of challenging issues by considering a range of spatial and temporal scales with perspectives from a variety of disciplines. The book starts with an overview of the technical progress leading to new management applications for a range of field contexts and spatial scales. Topics include colour imagery, multi-spectral and hyper-spectral imagery, video, photogrammetry and LiDAR. The book then discusses management applications such as targeted, network scale, planning, land-use change modelling at catchment scales, characterisation of channel reaches (riparian vegetation, geomorphic features) in both spatial and temporal dimensions, fish habitat assessment, flow measurement, monitoring river restoration and maintenance and, the appraisal of human perceptions of riverscapes. Key Features: • A specific focus on management applications in a period of increasing demands on managers to characterize river features and their evolution at different spatial scales • An integration across all scales of imagery with a clear discussion of both ground based and airborne images • Includes a wide-range of environmental problems • Coverage of cutting-edge technology • Contributions from leading researchers in the field

Provides critiques of current practices for environmental flow assessment and shows how they can be improved, using case studies. In “Environmental Flow Assessment: Methods and Applications”, four leading experts critique methods used to manage flows in regulated streams and rivers to balance environmental (instream) and out-of-stream uses of water. Intended for managers as well as practitioners, the book dissects the shortcomings of commonly used approaches, and offers practical advice for selecting and implementing better ones. The authors argue that methods for environmental flow assessment (EFA) can be defensible as well as practicable only if they squarely address uncertainty and provide guidance for doing so. Introductory chapters describe the scientific and social reasons that EFA is hard and provide a brief history. Because management of regulated streams starts with understanding freshwater ecosystems, Environmental Flow Assessment: Methods and Applications includes chapters on flow and organisms in streams. The following chapters assess standard and emerging methods, how they should be tested, and how they should (or should not) be applied. The book concludes with practical recommendations for implementing environmental flow assessment. • Describes historical and recent trends in environmental flow assessment • Directly addresses practical difficulties with applying a scientifically informed approach in contentious circumstances • Serves as an effective introduction to the relevant literature, with many references to articles in related scientific fields • Pays close attention to statistical issues such as sampling, estimation of statistical uncertainty, and model selection • Includes recommendations for methods and approaches • Examines how methods have been tested in the past and shows how they should be tested today and in the future Environmental Flow Assessment: Methods and Applications is an excellent book for biologists and specialists in allied fields such as engineering, ecology, fluvial geomorphology, environmental planning, landscape architecture, along with river managers and decision makers.

Fluvial Geomorphology studies the biophysical processes acting in rivers, and the sediment patterns and landforms resulting from them. It is a discipline of synthesis, with roots in geology, geography, and river engineering, and with strong interactions with allied fields such as ecology, engineering and landscape architecture. This book comprehensively reviews tools used in fluvial geomorphology, at a level suitable to guide the selection of research methods for a given question. Presenting an integrated approach to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, it provides guidance for researchers and professionals on the tools available to answer questions on river restoration and management. Thoroughly updated since the first edition in 2003 by experts in their subfields, the book presents state-of-the-art tools that have revolutionized fluvial geomorphology in recent decades, such as physical and numerical modelling, remote sensing and GIS, new field techniques, advances in dating, tracking and sourcing, statistical approaches as well as more traditional methods such as the systems framework, stratigraphic analysis, form and flow characterisation and historical analysis. This book: • Covers five main types of geomorphological questions and their associated tools: historical framework; spatial framework; chemical, physical and biological methods; analysis of processes and forms; and future understanding framework. • Provides guidance on advantages and limitations of different tools for different applications, data sources, equipment and supplies needed, and case studies illustrating their application in an integrated perspective. It is an essential resource for researchers and professional geomorphologists, hydrologists, geologists, engineers, planners, and ecologists concerned with river management, conservation and restoration. It is a useful supplementary textbook for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in Geography, Geology, Environmental Science, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and interdisciplinary courses in river management and restoration.

River restoration initiatives are now widespread across the world. The research efforts undertaken to support them are increasingly interdisciplinary, focusing on ecological, chemical, physical as well as societal issues. “River Restoration: Political, Social, and Economic Perspectives” provides a comprehensive overview of research in the field of river restoration in humanities and the social sciences. It illustrates how, in the last thirty years or so, such approaches have evolved and strengthened within the restoration sciences. The scientific community working in this domain has structured itself, often regionally and circumstantially, to critically assess and improve restoration policies and practices. As a research field, river restoration tackles three thematic axes: • Human-river interactions—especially perceptions and practices of rivers, and how these interactions can be changed by restoration projects • Political processes, with a particular interest in governance and decision-making, and a specific emphasis on the question of public participation in restoration projects • Evaluation of the social and economic benefits of river restoration “River Restoration: Political, Social, and Economic Perspectives” encompasses these three topics, and more, to provide the reader with the most up-to-date and holistic view of this constantly evolving area. The book will be of particular interest to human and social scientists, biophysical scientists (hydrologists, geomorphologists, ecologists), environmental scientists, public policy makers, design or planning officers, and anyone working in the field of river restoration.

With $2 billion spent annually on-stream restoration worldwide, there is a pressing need for guidance in this area, but until now, there was no comprehensive text on the subject. Filling that void, this unique text covers both new and existing information following a stepwise approach on theory, planning, implementation, and evaluation methods for the restoration of stream habitats. Comprehensively illustrated with case studies from around the world, “Stream and Watershed Restoration” provides a systematic approach to restoration programs suitable for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses on stream or watershed restoration or as a reference for restoration practitioners and fisheries scientists.