Session Coordinators: Damion Ciotti, Karen Pope, USFW; Kate Lundquist, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center; and Carrie Monahan, Mooretown Rancheria

 

Process-based restoration is focused on using human ingenuity and nature’s energy and materials to create complexity and restore natural connections in degraded rivers, streams, and meadows. The approach has undergone innovations to stream structure design, infrastructure and land use adaptation, methods in site and watershed assessment, and adaptions to local conditions and restrictions. This session provides an opportunity to share these recent advancements including successes and failures of innovative approaches. These may be field-based, computer-based, or science and monitoring-based approaches. Presentations will include efforts that directly open stream process space or scale up to restore natural watershed processes. Examples include restoring more natural flood limits within agricultural and urban areas, beaver coexistence, expanding the limit of natural stream channel development or modifications to road or drainage networks that restore watershed process. This session will also include new tools and assessment methods to evaluate these techniques.