Monitoring Urban Streams: Strategies and Protocols for Humid-Region Lowland Systems

Governmental mandates and public awareness have forcedprogressively smaller and less sophisticated agencies andorganizations to initiate stream monitoring programs,particularly in urban and urbanizing areas. Yet many of thesemonitoring efforts lack either a coherent conceptual frameworkor appropriately chosen methods, and they rely on monitoringtechniques that are simply infeasible for these institutionalsettings. We propose a monitoring strategy, and specificexisting monitoring protocols, that will be useful for themanagement and rehabilitation of streams in urbanizing watersheds.A monitoring strategy must be developed by 1) identifying the management question(s) being addressed, 2) determining theinstitional level of effort required (and available) toeffectively make particular kinds of measurements, and 3) identifying what specific parameters should and can be measured.Only a limited set of parameters show much utility orfeasibility in addressing the most common management questionsbeing faced by municipalities in urbanizing, humid-area regionsof the United States. These include measures of riparian canopy,bank erosion and bank hardening, and in-stream large woodydebris. With some additional expertise useful data can also beincluded on channel gradient, substrate composition, and pools.Nearly all of the other myriad parameters that have beenmeasured historically on rivers and streams show little apparentvalue in these watershed and institutional settings.