The river restoration 'ecological toolbox': examining biomonitoring indices to guide catchment management strategies

This project will develop an 'ecological toolbox' that identifies primary stressor(s) stressing river ecosystems and the likelihood of promoting ecological recovery following the implementation of specific river restoration strategies. It will do so by employing primary data collection a 'big-data' approach to assess key anthropogenic stressors which should be prioritised based on the response of multiple macroinvertebrate metrics and identify river restoration opportunities. The candidate will draw on the expertise of the River Restoration Centre and their 'National River Restoration Inventory' to target watercourses exposed to specific human interventions and pressures. The candidate will also work with the Environment Agency's 'BIOSYS' dataset on long-term freshwater river macroinvertebrate surveys from targeted rivers. Catchment-wide assessments and knowledge on a suite of river restoration measures will be undertaken to inform effective management strategies. The industrial partners will help identify restoration projects (near completion or recently finished) with robust baseline data which would be the focus of primary data field collection. This will provide a greater causal understanding of the ecological mechanisms underpinning macroinvertebrate metric responses, thus further refining and improving the ecological toolbox and its ability to predict sustainable river restoration interventions.