Getting a holistic picture of a freshwater restoration project presents several challenges: how can different aspects and scales be correlated – especially if some aspects were not considered or targeted per se in the project plan or tracked in subsequent monitoring?
The EcoAdvance team and partners at BOKU, developed a visualization tool that covers a broad spectrum of aspects that can be influenced by a freshwater restoration project. The tool enables project stakeholders to correlate various factors and create a composite picture of what the project achieved or plans to achieve.
The tool can be used at various stages of the project – planning (were all factors considered?), communicating results (visualizes the total project), rationale as part of a funding process (Where are the likely outputs?) and highlighting which areas were and were not addressed.
It’s applicable for both large-scale initiatives and smaller, community-based projects.
Completing all of the questions in the tool will give you the most robust picture. The information you provide is confidential and returned to you in the form of a radar chart that highlights the relative output of the following key areas of restoration projects: ecological, physicochemical, hydromorphological factors, ecosystem services and economic and social dimensions.
In addition to returning the data to you, the data is also anonymized and used as part of EcoAdvance’s mandate to determine national and regional trends in European river restoration efforts and identifying what makes projects prone to success."