Every river health assessment is developed in response to a specific purpose, river management profile, set of stakeholder interests, health stressors, available resources, and existing data. That makes every assessment unique. Despite the kaleidoscope of variability, most river health assessments follow a typical development path. This page outlines a series of steps that can help you successfully implement a river health assessment and leverage outcomes to educate communities and motivate action. While there is a natural order to the steps, some can be carried out concurrently.
Step 1: Identify the Purpose of the Assessment
The need to clearly define the purpose(s) of a river health assessment may seem obvious, but even so its importance is often not sufficiently recognized. Clearly articulating the specific motivations, goals, desired outcomes, and intended audience and uses of an assessment will ensure that questions, analyses, and outputs are responsive to available resources, community needs and will support realistic watershed actions and strategies.
Step 2: Scope the Assessment
With the purpose stated, it is time to scope the assessment by answering a series of framing questions, such as: Where will the assessment start? Where will it stop? Which streams will be included? How long will the assessment last? Who will perform the various assessment tasks? In other words, scoping is the process of clearly describing what will be assessed, who will do the work, and the geographic and temporal bounds that the assessment will cover. This work will provide the scaffolding on which to build robust budgets, identify the outside expertise needed, develop a realistically implementable portfolio of methods, and forecast how long the assessment is likely to take. The thought and detail put into scoping will largely determine the degree of alignment between task expectations, budgets, and timelines. The success of a river health assessment effort often hinges on the thoughtful scoping.
Step 3: Fund the Assessment
While all steps in a river health assessment are important, nothing happens without funding. Securing funding can be a daunting task, but numerous funding sources are available to groups performing river health assessments in Colorado. Securing funding from different sources requires an understanding of the different funding purposes, application processes, and application timelines. The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) and the various Basin Roundtables are often the first places to look for support. Financial support provided by these sources can be matched against other funds secured from local governments, private foundations, and conservation organizations, to name a few.
Step 4: Engage Stakeholders
Stakeholders to a river health assessment are the individuals and entities affected by the health and functioning of the river. The diversity of stakeholders is as broad as the range of interests in a river and may include municipal water suppliers, agricultural producers, tourism businesses, local landowners, and recreational river users. Their individual or collective concerns about existing or potential future river health conditions provide the underlying motivation for river health assessment activities. Seeking stakeholder support and/or consensus regarding a health assessment’s purpose, and effectively conveying its results is essential to ensuring a broad understanding of the river health situation and the implications of future actions.
Step 5: Assemble the Technical Team
A river health assessment is often too big and technically diverse for a single person to complete. In most cases, a multidisciplinary Technical Team of subject-matter experts will need to be formed to carry out various aspects of the specific assessment, tasks. and Assembling the right team is key to your success. The areas of expertise covered by a Technical Team generally include riparian ecology, hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, water quality, riparian ecology, and aquatic biology. The team member’s’ir technical capabilities will typically include a variety of rapid or intensive field assessment methods, GIS mapping and analysis, hydrological and hydraulic modelling, water quality analysis, and biological characterizations.
Step 6: Customize the Assessment Framework
CoRHAF is a generic structure and approach to assessment. It is the role of the Technical Team to develop individualized assessment approaches tailored to the needs of the watershed or stream of interest and in response to stakeholder concerns. This will result in a framework that will meet local needs and reflect the capabilities and resources available to carry out the assessment. Getting this right requires careful thought about the Drivers, Components and Metrics selected for grading river health.
Step 7: Carry out the Assessment
Conducting the assessment is the heart of the CoRHAF process. This is the step where available information and data are assembled, new data are collected, analyses are performed, and all assessment outputs are expertly interpreted and rated in relation to selected grading guidelines. This is a big step with lots of moving parts. Generating reliable and relevant information during this step is fundamental to ensuring that the outputs from a river health assessment can be effectively communicated and used to motivate meaningful actions to preserve or improve river health.
Step 8: Communicate Findings
At this point, the Technical Team and local stakeholders should have a strong understanding of existing river health conditions and should be well-poised to identify and prioritize any locations or issues of particular interest. This information must be effectively conveyed to stakeholders and to the broader community. The crossover of this understanding with community interests can be the catalyst for driving the creation of watershed plans, Stream Management Plans (SMP), Integrated Water Management Plans (IWMP), Wildfire Ready Action Plans (WRAP), and other strategic planning efforts.
Step 9: Integrate Results with Strategic Planning Efforts
Put your stream health assessment findings to work! This is the step where the rubber meets the road. Integrating stream health assessment results with strategic land and water planning efforts helps communities identify and prioritize critical management actions that help meet short- and long-term visions for river health. Your river health assessment promotes a common understanding of local conditions and gives the river a voice in the planning process.
