Hydromorphological assessment aimed to river management and restoration of European streams within the context of the REFORM project

REFORM (REstoring rivers FOR effective catchment Management) is a collaborative EU project funded under the topic ‘Hydromorphology and ecological objectives of the Water Framework Directive’ (FP7), targeted towards development of guidance and tools to make river restoration and mitigation measures more cost-effective. Aims of REFORM are (1) to provide a framework for improving the success of hydromorphological restoration measures, and (2) to assess more effectively the state of rivers and floodplain systems. The restoration framework addresses the relevance of dynamic processes at various spatial and temporal scales, the need for setting end-points, analysis of risks and benefits, and integration with other societal demands (e.g. flood protection and water supply). Within the context of the REFORM project, the activity of UNIFI (Università di Firenze) is mainly focussed on: (1) review of existing hydromorphological assessment methods; (2) development of a process-based European assessment framework for hydromorphology; (3) improve existing methods to survey and assess the hydromorphology of river ecosystems. The objective of this presentation is to provide an overview of the project, with particular focus on the review, improvement, and development of methods for hydromorphological assessment. A literature review was initially carried out, by performing a critical analysis of the suitability of available hydromorphological methods used in river management and restoration. The main gap in most of the methods is the insufficient consideration of physical processes in the assessment of hydromorphological conditions. In fact, many current river assessment methods emphasise the ‘site’ scale, and carry out a census of the frequency and extent of individual habitat units or morphological features (e.g. flow types, pools, riffles, etc). A multi-scale, process-based framework is under development, which incorporates the above types of information into a common framework for the spatial and temporal assessment of the controls on reach dynamics, and a process-based interpretation of the current status of river reaches, their historical dynamics and their likely future trajectories of change. Improvement of existing hydromorphological methods is aimed to produce a cost-effective and widely applicable system for channel - floodplain hydromorphological survey, assessment and classification, with specific consideration to channel dynamics and floodplains, and practical suitable for the WFD. The method under development is an improvement and expansion at European level of the Morphological Quality Index (MQI), the method adopted in Italy for the hydromorphological analysis required by the WFD.