The present report presents guidance and decision support for cost-effective river and floodplain restoration and its benefits. It serves as a portal to the web-based information system or wiki developed within REFORM and summarizes the contents, structure and functionality of this wiki. The wiki guides the planning process and design of cost-effective and hydromorphologically relevant restoration and its benefits. 

 This deliverable D4.5 summarizes information and experiences for thirteen river types and lists meta-data analysis results based on 844 publications. The report starts with a summary of a literature meta-data analysis, using the REFORM river reach typology. The main component of the report deals with fact sheets and per river type provides a synthesis of restoration experiences describing best and efficient restoration practices, including promising restoration techniques and variables suited for monitoring restoration.

Fluvial communities and their ecological integrity are the result of their evolutionary adaptation to river habitats. Flowing water is the main driver for development and maintenance of these habitats, which is why environmental flows (e-Flows) are needed where societal demands are depleting water resources. Fluvial habitats are not only the result of water flow, however, but are shaped by the combined interaction of water, sediments woody/organic material, and riparian vegetation. Water abstraction, flow regulation by dams, gravel pits or siltation by fine sediments eroded from hillslopes are pressures that can disturb interactions among water, sediments, and other constituents that create the habitats needed by fluvial communities. 

Present e-Flow design criteria are based only on water flow requirements. Here we argue that sediment dynamics need to be considered when specifying instream flows, thereby expanding the environmental objectives and definition of e-Flows to include sediments (extended e-Flows).

Rivers are highly complex ecosystems with interrelated processes between physical, chemical and biological components. River restoration efforts are put in place to overcome pressures from the development sector to improve river process and function, nevertheless, river restoration tends to encounter obstacles as a result of these societal demands. To stop restoration projects falling short of their objectives, there is a need to demonstrate and predict the effects of human activities on these components spatially and temporally.

The overall aim of this document is to provide guidance and tools for river managers to analyse the potential effects of degradation, restoration, climate and land use change to optimise benefits between cross-sectoral river services and ecological requirements whilst considering climate change effects. Failure to plan across the full array of ecological and socioeconomic co-benefits can have undesirable and unanticipated consequences.

Work Package 6 of REFORM focuses on monitoring protocols, survey methods, assessment procedures, gudelines 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).

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 policy paper aims are to identify specific issues and raise awareness of the issues related to groundwater-river interactions by improving knowledge transfers to policy makers and water managers. Groundwater is a key factor in supporting ecological flows (Eflows), both concerning quantity and quality of surface water required for Good Status of aquatic ecosystems. 

The aim of this deliverable is to address the impact of hydromorphological degradation on floodplain and riparian ecosystems, with specific focus on vegetation, fish and invertebrate responses and to provide guidance on how to identify those impacts. 

An introductory chapter summarises the research context and reviews the lessons for managers and stakeholders. Based on the results of the analyses, and the river styles typology developed in Work Package 2 of REFORM, a generic process is recommended for assessing the impact on floodplain and riparian ecosystems, incorporating our key findings. It also highlights the usefulness and limitations of existing EU Directives in providing a suitable legislative framework. 

Assessments of instream impacts on riverine ecosystems make use of multi-site datasets, riparian and floodplain ecosystems are not subject to this type of extensive monitoring; hence, the results presented here are based primarily on case studies from across Europe.

The report provides an overview of existing guidelines and manuals related to the assessment of costs and benefits of river restoration. Although there exist many cost-benefit analysis handbooks, there are not many related specifically to river restoration. This report aims to fill this gap, and focuses on the specific characteristics of the estimation of costs and benefits related to river restoration. The report discusses the classification and assessment of costs and benefits of river restoration, and develops a benefits transfer approach that can be used to assess benefits when it is not possible to carry out primary valuation research. Key methodological issues in a CBA of river restoration are identified, discussed and illustrated. The report provides a number of practical recommendations to practitioners.

The success of river restoration is often poorly quantified due to poor design, absence of proper monitoring or incomplete documentation. This study is an attempt to overcome this ex-post using the aggregating nature of the ecosystem services approach. In 8 pairs of restored reaches and their adjacent floodplains of middle-sized European rivers, we quantified as many provisioning, regulating and cultural services as possible that were of final value to humans as annual biogeochemical or –physical fluxes, or densities per year, and summed these to annual economic value normalised per area. 

 Summary

An increasing number of river sections have been restored in the past few decades but only a small number of these projects have been monitored. The few monitoring studies mainly investigated single organism groups, reported contrasting results, and rarely did investigate the influence of catchment, river or project characteristics. In this study, we compiled a harmonized dataset on the effects of hydromorphological river restoration measures on biota based on a standardized monitoring design to minimize scatter due to methodological differences. A broad range of response variables was recorded to draw conclusions on the effect of restoration on biota in general, including habitat composition in the river and its floodplain, three aquatic and two floodplain-inhabiting organism groups, as well as food web composition and aquatic land interactions as reflected by stable isotopes. Additional data on factors potentially constraining or enhancing the effect of restoration were compiled to identify conditions which favour restoration success. The main focus was dedicated to investigate the effect of restoration extent (as indicated by restored section length and restoration intensity).

Part 4 of Deliverable 2.1 "Multi-scale framework and indicators of hydromorphological processes and forms" provides four partial applications of the framework described in Part 1 to case study catchments (River Tweed, UK; River Loire, France; River Tagliamento, Italy; Rivers Lech and Lafnitz, Austria). These case studies are mainly confined to the delineation and characterisation phases of the framework, but they incorporate additional environmental settings to the complete case studies provided in Part 3.