Physical habitat assessment
Physical habitat assessment
Type
Hydromorphological assessment methods
Brief description
Physical habitat assessment methods aim to identify, survey and assess physical habitats and/or the overall functioning and conditions of rivers and streams. They are mainly applied at a local/reach scale, consider all the spatial components of a river corridor (channel, riparian area and floodplain), and assess the hydromorphological state at present time. We reviewed 72 methods belonging to this broad category (39 for European countries and 33 for non-European countries) (Table 1).
Strengths, limitation and gaps
Methods of physical habitat assessment aim to characterize the range of physical habitats, heterogeneity and structure of ecosystems. These methods have often a great ecological relevance. The main limitation is that these methods are not suitable to understand physical processes and causes of river alterations, because of a series of reasons, including the scale of investigation (too small), the survey resolution (too much accurate), the temporal scale (not taken into account), the variability of river systems (not covered).
Other relevant information
Summary tables of analyzed physical habitat assessement methods are available here:
- For European countries: File:1 EU.pdf
- For non European countries: File:1 nonEU.pdf
In the table we recorded whether the analyzed method considers or not a specific feature. Three options were considered: presence (tick), absence ( ), and probably assessed (PA), the latter indicating when there is an uncertainty concerning whether the feature is collected and/or when the feature may be indirectly obtained.
Table 1 lists key and analyzed references for methods of phisical habitat assessment.
