Efficient monitoring of a river restoration project

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

Today’s paper comes from the April issue of the North American Journal of Fisheries Management, and I found it interesting because it combined remote sensing and field data collection to assess a river restoration project. The authors did a great job of outlining expected responses in measured variables that would then indicate successful restoration activities. In addition, they compared the cost in time and resources of conducting field evaluations of habitat restoration with the costs associated with the remote sensing assessment of those metrics, Very Valuable! Being from Iowa, I always like to throw in local references. So, I think that this study illustrated a point made in Field of Dreams – “If you build it (right), they will come!” The results indicate that restoration work done well does lead to habitat improvements, and also resulted in improvements in the fish community.

Efficient monitoring of a large river restoration project using a combination of remote sensing and field data