What is NRRSS?
The National River Restoration Science Synthesis (NRRSS) is the result of four years of research on what is being done in the name of river restoration. In the fall of 2002 Margaret Palmer (UMD) and David Allan (UMI) brought together a diverse team of river scientists with the goal of improving the scientific basis of river restoration. Most members of the group had been involved in one or a few restoration projects, but all recognized that at the time there was no central clearinghouse of information on river restoration that would allow one to ask even the most rudimentary questions about restoration activities (such as How much are we spending on river restoration annually? What motivates the majority of river restoration projects?)
The Problem
Because streams and rivers are so important economically and ecologically, restoration of these ecosystems is receiving a lot of attention and enormous financial support. Restoration activities are diverse, ranging from channel engineering, to hydrologic experimentation, renewal of riparian vegetation, bank stabilization and habitat improvement. All levels of government, as well as volunteer groups and non-governmental organizations, are players. Projects vary in scope from some of the largest imaginable (e.g., the Everglades), to small reaches of headwater streams. While some of these efforts are being catalogued on a local or regional scale, few are analyzed at all, and even fewer are evaluated for ecological success.
Both the development of restoration ecology as a science and the success of restoration projects depend on linking the practice with the science, yet many thousands of stream restoration activities take place annually, only a fraction of which benefit from the combined insights of practitioners and scientists. It is tragic, for example, that scores of dams have been removed in Pennsylvania over the past few years in an aggressive stream restoration program undertaken by the state, but almost no monitoring data were collected before or after the removals. Policy makers are making costly decisions about the types and location of restoration projects with little or no information on their effectiveness.
The Process
To begin to improve this situation, NRRSS built the first representative database of river restoration projects for the U.S.. Graduate students within each of seven regional nodes combed through databases, contacted hundreds of management agencies, non-profit groups and consulting firms, ultimately building a database of river restoration projects from more than 500 separate data sources.
Our compilation 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. The extent of restoration activity varies by region, with the greatest number of projects occurring in the Pacific Northwest. Only 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.
In the process of gathering project records, it became obvious that most written project records provide little insight into the outcome of restoration projects. To gather more in-depth information about project outcomes and lessons learned we subsequently performed confidential telephone interviews with project managers to: i) collect their opinions about the motivations for implementing river restoration projects and the metrics of success used in project evaluation; and, ii) estimate the proportion of projects that set and meet criteria for ecologically successful river restoration projects. Selection of projects for interviews was made by taking a stratified random subsample from the national database, where the strata were the four most common restoration goal categories: riparian management, water quality management, in-stream habitat improvement and channel reconfiguration. According to project managers, ecological degradation was the most common factor motivating restoration activity, but post-project appearance based on site visits and positive public opinion or awareness were the most common metrics used to evaluate project success. Less than half of all projects set measurable objectives (success criteria) for their projects, but nearly 2/3 of all interviewees felt that their projects had been “completely successful”. Projects that used scientifically rigorous approaches and that best matched our criteria for effectiveness had similar costs, spatial extent, and project managers’ opinions regarding project success. A very high proportion of these “highly effective” projects had significant community involvement and most had advisory committees – indicating that effective restoration planning and process benefits from stakeholder input.
Lessons Learned
As the NRRSS projects is reaching its conclusion, our working group is moving beyond reporting the results of our synthesis and interview efforts to making recommendations about how the practice of restoration (at both local and regional scales) can be improved. This website has been developed as a forum for sharing and disseminating information about restoration and for encouraging better project reporting and higher standards for river restoration projects.