Resilience of the disturbed condition: Can Bioassessment of River Restoration Give Insight to Restoration Success at Different Temporal and Spatial Scales?

We explore the use of bioassessment and biotic indices to evaluate stream restoration at different spatial and temporal scales.  Stream restoration (e.g., improved road crossings to reduce erosion and increase connectivity) provides case study experiments to examine stream dynamics and regime stability.  Biotic assessment indices show that though improvements can be documented over a short time frame (1-2 years after restoration), longer-term monitoring (5 years) indicated stream systems returned to their degraded state.  Managers can gain insight to the temporal and spatial effectiveness of isolated, small scale restoration while ecologists have an opportunity to evaluate the transient nature of response.