Analysis of River Restoration Hydrologic Function: Meadows as Macro-Hyporheic Zones

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Gorelick0337393The emerging effort to rebuild spoiled ecosystems often involves river restoration. Such hydroecological intervention aims to return each degraded terrestrial environment to a more natural state. Although river restoration has been initiated in various environments in recent years, there are few tools to track, quantifying, and evaluate hydrologic changes over space and time. This proposal involves a comparative analysis of degraded meadows and those in which river restoration has been conducted to mimic the natural environment in the Feather River watershed in northern California. The Feather River watershed was targeted because it is accessible and contains single-river meadows where the channels have been relocated as part of restoration efforts. The remaining degraded meadows have deeply incised river channels and dry grassland vegetation. Our goal is to develop an approach to quantitatively assess river restoration in small meadows. We plan to conduct fieldwork and collect remote sensing data to characterize the key aspects of the state of each meadow in our comparison set. We will focus on the riparian-zone interface where mass and energy exchanges occur between the river and aquifer as well as between vegetation and the connected vadose-phreatic zone. Our analysis will rely on physically-based simulation models that describe water and energy fluxes. Our intended contribution is to develop and test a set of transferable measures that might be used to 1) assess river-restoration projects, 2) gain an understanding of the key changes in hydrologic processes in restored and degraded meadow environments, and 3) provide at least some of the hydrological-science basis for successful hydroecological restoration. To enhance outreach, we have initiated interaction with the Feather River Coordinated Resource Management Group (FRCRM), a non-profit public interest group consisting of 23 watershed stakeholders that was formed in 1985.