Browsing by Author "Wilkes, Martin A."

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    Best practices for monitoring and assessing the ecological response to river restoration
    (MDPI, 2021-11-26) England, Judy; Angelopoulos, Natalie; Cooksley, Susan; Dodd, Jennifer; Gill, Andrew B.; Gilvear, David; Johnson, Matthew; Naura, Marc; O’Hare, Matthew; Tree, Angus; Wheeldon, Jennifer; Wilkes, Martin A.
    Nature-based solutions are widely advocated for freshwater ecosystem conservation and restoration. As increasing amounts of river restoration are undertaken, the need to understand the ecological response to different measures and where measures are best applied becomes more pressing. It is essential that appraisal methods follow a sound scientific approach. Here, experienced restoration appraisal experts review current best practice and academic knowledge to make recommendations and provide guidance that will enable practitioners to gather and analyse meaningful data, using scientific rigor to appraise restoration success. What should be monitored depends on the river type and the type and scale of intervention. By understanding how habitats are likely to change we can anticipate what species, life stages, and communities are likely to be affected. Monitoring should therefore be integrated and include both environmental/habitat and biota assessments. A robust scientific approach to monitoring and appraisal is resource intensive. We recommend that appraisal efforts be directed to where they will provide the greatest evidence, including ‘flagship’ restoration schemes for detailed long-term monitoring. Such an approach will provide the evidence needed to understand which restoration measures work where and ensure that they can be applied with confidence elsewhere.
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    Defining recovery potential in river restoration: a biological data-driven approach
    (MDPI, 2021-11-24) Wilkes, Martin A.; Mckenzie, Morwenna; Naura, Marc; Allen, Laura; Morris, Mike; Van De Wiel, Marco; Dumbrell, Alex J.; Bani, Alessia; Lashford, Craig; Lavers, Tom; England, Judy
    Scientists and practitioners working on river restoration have made progress on understanding the recovery potential of rivers from geomorphological and engineering perspectives. We now need to build on this work to gain a better understanding of the biological processes involved in river restoration. Environmental policy agendas are focusing on nature recovery, reigniting debates about the use of “natural” reference conditions as benchmarks for ecosystem restoration. We argue that the search for natural or semi-natural analogues to guide restoration planning is inappropriate due to the absence of contemporary reference conditions. With a catchment-scale case study on the invertebrate communities of the Warwickshire Avon, a fifth-order river system in England, we demonstrate an alternative to the reference condition approach. Under our model, recovery potential is quantified based on the gap between observed biodiversity at a site and the biodiversity predicted to occur in that location under alternative management scenarios. We predict that commonly applied restoration measures such as reduced nutrient inputs and the removal of channel resectioning could be detrimental to invertebrate diversity, if applied indiscriminately and without other complementary measures. Instead, our results suggest considerable potential for increases in biodiversity when restoration measures are combined in a way that maximises biodiversity within each water body