Work Package 6 of REFORM focuses on monitoring protocols, survey methods, assessment procedures, guidelines and other tools for characterising the consequences of physical degradation and restoration, and for planning and designing successful river restoration and mitigation measures and programmes. Deliverable 6.2 of Work Package 6 is the final report on methods, models and tools to assess the hydromorphology of rivers. This report summarises the outputs of Tasks 6.1 (Selection of indicators for cost-effective monitoring and development of monitoring protocols to assess river degradation and restoration), 6.2 (Improve existing methods to survey and assess the hydromorphology of river ecosystems), and 6.3 (Identification and selection of existing hydromorphological and ecological models and tools suitable to plan and evaluate river restoration).

The deliverable is structured in five parts. Part 1 provides an overall framework for hydromorphological assessment. Part 2 includes thematic annexes on protocols for monitoring indicators and models. Part 3 (this volume) is a detailed guidebook for the application of the Morphological Quality Index (MQI). Part 4 describes the Geomorphic Units survey and classification System. Part 5 includes a series of applications to some case studies of some of the tools and methods reported in the previous parts.

Summary of Deliverable 6.2 Part 3

This part provides a detailed description of the Morphological Quality Index (MQI), and the related version adapted for monitoring (Morphological Quality Index for monitoring, MQIm). The Morphological Quality Index was originally developed in Italy, and then expanded to other European countries within the context of the REFORM project. The Morphological Quality Index for monitoring (MQIm), has been specifically designed to assess the environmental impact assessment of interventions, including both flood mitigation and restoration actions.

The Evaluation Forms for confined and for partly confined/unconfined streams respectively, a detailed Guide to the Compilation of the Evaluation Forms, which is used to support the application of the two indices, and an Illustrated Guide are provided in the Appendixes of this part.

In 2016 the method has been further improved to better address low energy rivers (Rinaldi et al 2016), which is also available as download below. The updated MQI excel sheets are available in a ZIP file below (' MQI_ver_oct_2016.zip').