Seeking river restoration appraisal best practice: supporting wider national and international

Abstract

With growing investment in river restoration, we increasingly need to justify costs by demonstrating success and wider benefits of measures. To aid practitioners, the UK River Restoration Centre (RRC) has worked with experts to develop a practical monitoring guidance (PRAGMO) that links objectives to specific monitoring to demonstrate achievable outcomes. Feedback, however, via an on‐line questionnaire highlighted the need to rationalise the guidance contents for a new growing audience, taking advantage of new developments and incorporating the evaluation of social and economic aspects of river restoration. With these potential improvements, it is hoped that practitioners will follow this guidance, improve the quality of monitoring undertaken and share evidence of success and lessons learnt. This paper outlines how this guidance has been adopted as best practice. We discuss why we need to embed this guidance into wider monitoring protocols that can feed into national and international environmental policy and targets.