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Assessing the Restoration Success of River Widenings: A Landscape Approach

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Abstract

During the last 200 years, many rivers in industrialized countries have been modified by canalization. In the last two decades, the philosophy of river management has changed considerably, and restoration of ecological integrity has become an important management goal. One appealing restoration approach is to create “river widenings” that permit braiding within a limited area. This study presents a new and efficient framework for rapidly assessing such widening projects and offers a novel method to comparing restored sites with near-natural stretches (stencil technique). The proposed framework evaluates spatial patterns of riparian habitat types using landscape metrics as indicators. Three case studies from river restoration (river widening) in Switzerland are presented for demonstration purposes.

The method compares restored sites with prerestoration conditions and near-natural conditions, which are assumed to represent the worst and best case states of a river system. To take into account the limited spatial extent of the restored sites, the so-called “stencil technique” was developed, where the landscape metrics of the near-natural reference sites are calculated for both the entire study area and smaller sections (clips). The clips are created by using a stencil that has the exact shape and size of the restored area (random window-sampling technique). Subsequently, the calculated metrics for the restored sites are compared to the range of values calculated for the near-natural data subset.

Our studies show that the proposed method is easy to apply andprovides a valid way to assess the restoration success of river widenings. We found that river widenings offer real opportunities for establishing riparian habitats. However, they promote mainly pioneer successional stages and the habitat mosaic of the restored section is more complex than at the near-natural reference sites.

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Acknowledgments

We thank P. Englmaier and F. Herzog for helpful feedback on an earlier draft and M. W. Doyle, A. R. G. Large, M. G. Turner, and two anonymous reviewers for their extended comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the manuscript. We are also grateful to C. Ginzler for advice in the process of converting aerial photographs to orthophotos.

This study is part of the Rhone-Thur-Project funded by the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG), the Swiss Federal Office for Water and Geology (FOWG), and the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL).

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  1. Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, CH-8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Sigrun Rohde, Felix Kienast & Matthias Bürgi

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  1. Sigrun Rohde
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Correspondence to Sigrun Rohde.

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Rohde, S., Kienast, F. & Bürgi, M. Assessing the Restoration Success of River Widenings: A Landscape Approach. Environmental Management 34, 574–589 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-004-0158-y

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