ABSTRACT Restoration of floodplain habitats is one of the most common approaches to restoring ecological processes, ecosystem services, increasing floodplain capacity, and improving habitat for endangered salmon and trout. Restoring floodplains at a reach or valley segment scale to an anastomosing or other multi‐thread channel patterns, often called “Stage 0” or valley bottom restoration, has become common in the United States. However, additional information is needed to ensure these projects are successful, implemented in the right locations, and not the latest watershed restoration technique applied inappropriately. Using lessons learned from floodplain restoration in the Grande Ronde River Basin in Oregon, we outline key considerations for planning, designing, and implementing valley bottom restoration projects. We first crosswalk the stages of channel evolution in the stream evolution model, commonly used for valley bottom restoration, with channel types in popular stream classification schemes, and then identify natural anastomosing and meandering channels in the Grande Ronde Basin to assist with designing valley bottom restoration projects. Next, we discuss how to determine whether a reach or valley segment is appropriate for valley bottom restoration, including examining the current, historic, and potential for a site to support anastomosing or other channel types. We then discuss considerations for project design and implementation including: goals, hydraulic modeling, habitat suitability modeling, and other tools to develop and evaluate design alternatives. Valley bottom restoration projects present unique challenges for monitoring, and we close with guidelines for monitoring that rely on remote sensing to map the entire valley bottom before and after restoration and that are linked directly to project objectives. This article is categorized under: Water and Life > Nature of Freshwater Ecosystems
Roni et al. (Sun,) studied this question.