How is success or failure in river restoration projects evaluated? Feedback from French restoration projects Bertrand Morandi a, * , Hervé Piégay a , Nicolas Lamouroux b , Lise Vaudor a a Université de Lyon, UMR 5600 EVS e CNRS, ENS de Lyon, 18, rue Chevreul, Lyon 69007, France b IRSTEA, UR MALY, 5 rue de la Doua, CS70077, 69626 Villeurbanne Cedex, France article info Article history: Received 30 October 2013 Received in revised form 5 February 2014 Accepted 10 February 2014 Available online 24 March 2014 Keywords: River restoration Evaluation Monitoring Public policy Social values France abstract Since the 1990s, French operational managers and scientists have been involved in the environmental restoration of rivers. The European Water Framework Directive (2000) highlights the need for feedback from restoration projects and for evidence-based evaluation of success. Based on 44 French pilot projects that included such an evaluation, the present study includes: 1) an introduction to restoration projects based on their general characteristics 2) a description of evaluation strategies and authorities in charge of their implementation, and 3) a focus on the evaluation of results and the links between these results and evaluation strategies. The results show that: 1) the quality of an evaluation strategy often remains too poor to understand well the link between a restoration project and ecological changes; 2) in many cases, the conclusions drawn are contradictory, making it difficult to determine the success or failure of a restoration project; and 3) the projects with the poorest evaluation strategies generally have the most positive conclusions about the effects of restoration. Recommendations are that evaluation strategies should be designed early in the project planning process and be based on clearly-defined objectives. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Impacts of human activities (e.g. damming, gravel extraction, channelization) on physical and ecological processes in rivers have been observed in many countries for many years (Gore, 1985; Gregory, 2006). Repairing environmental degradation has become a priority for western industrialised societies. Legal requirements regarding the environmental quality of waterbodies have been designated by the US Water Act (1972), the Canadian Water Act (1985), and more recently by the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) (2000). Hence, regional standards have been used to define which quality level is deemed sufficient for waterbodies. River restoration, which aims at meeting these standards, has become one of the major practices in river management (Brierley and Fryirs, 2005; Wohl et al., 2005). In France for instance, 480 actions declared as restorative were carried out between 1985 and 2009, according to a recent online census (Morandi and Piégay, 2011). The implementation of the WFD has caused a large increase in the number (264) of these actions since 2000. Although restoration projects are now more frequent than before, there is still a lack of evaluation and feedback (Jenkinson et al., 2006; Kondolf and Micheli, 1995; Nakamura et al., 2006). Several surveys of river restoration projects were carried out as part of national and international research programs. Most aimed at sharing experience about restoration and evaluation. Such pro- grams included the National River Restoration Science Synthesis in the USA (Bernhardt et al., 2007), the European Centre for River Restoration (http://www.ecrr.org/) and the Asian River Restoration Network (http://www.a-rr.net/). In France, water management in- stitutions (e.g. the Onema, French National Agency for Water and Aquatic Environments, and water agencies) have developed data- bases documenting the realisation of actions for river restoration. Still, little attention is given to the strategies and conclusions of restoration evaluation. In the USA, Bernhardt et al. (2007) concluded that only 10% of projects included “before, after & reference” monitoring related to goals or success criteria. In Japan, Nakamura et al. (2006) emphasised that evaluations were rare in the 1990s and had only been implemented in recent projects. There are two main issues regarding the evaluation of restora- tion projects. First, evaluation contributes to fundamental scientific knowledge. According to Bradshaw (1996), if restoration is “an acid * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ33 437376494. E-mail addresses: bertrand.morandi@ens-lyon.fr (B. Morandi), herve.piegay@ ens-lyon.fr (H. Piégay), nicolas.lamouroux@irstea.fr (N. Lamouroux), lise.vaudor@ ens-lyon.fr (L. Vaudor). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Environmental Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.02.010 0301-4797/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Environmental Management 137 (2014) 178e188