River Condition Assessment: What it solves and how it works

Research into river systems has shown how human intervention influences the biodiversity of rivers. At a time when the recovery of nature is critical in the battle to reverse climate change, river corridors provide an excellent starting point to make biodiversity gains which could spread exponentially into the floodplains and beyond. This paper looks at a metric which is approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to measure the condition of a river within a given reach. This paper discusses why you might need a river condition assessment (RCA), how variables that influence the results of the metric are quantified, how different scenarios can be modelled to provide the desired outcomes, and how some highly sensitive variables are measured more accurately to improve the integrity of the river condition assessment score.

Our process builds on the method described by Angela M. Gurnell et al., 2010. Assessing river condition: A multiscale approach designed for operational application in the context of biodiversity net gain.”