Urban stream restoration: Guidance for monitoring and assessment protocols

This paper is a joint product of the Urban Stream Restoration Task Committee (TC), a TC of the River Restoration Committee of the Hydraulics and Waterways Council (HWC), and the Urban Streams Committee of the Urban Water Resources Research Council (UWRRC). The goal of this endeavor is to produce a guidance document for monitoring and assessment protocols of urban stream restoration projects. Several stream restoration guidance documents contain sections with general protocols that do not distinguish their applicability between conditions found in urban and rural streams. General protocols typically rely on a reference stream to complete a pre-design assessment and a post-project comparison. Our product will differ from existing guidance documents because this effort focuses on urbanizing and urban streams, in which reference streams rarely exist and the return to a pristine (pre-development) condition through restoration is highly unlikely. Our final document will include a comprehensive summary of monitoring and assessment techniques used by the many disciplines (e.g., fluvial geomorphology, geotechnical and hydraulic engineering, ecology, etc.), integrated into a set of guidance protocols that do not necessitate the need for a reference stream. Motivation for this effort is the outcome of past meetings of the River Restoration Committee and Urban Streams Committee, in which members have identified its need among practitioners. This paper summarizes the progress to date, and provides an outline of the proposed guidance manual sections.