Integrating regional and local monitoring data and assessment tools to evaluate habitat conditions and inform river restoration..
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Restoring degraded rivers requires initial assessment of the fluvial landscape to identify stressors and riverine features that can be enhanced. We associated local-scale river habitat data collected using standardized national monitoring tools with modeled regional water temperature and flow data on mid-sized northwest U.S. rivers (30-60 m wide). We grouped these rivers according to quartiles of their modeled mean August water temperature and examined their physical habitat structure and flow. We compared local conditions in the Priest River, a river targeted for restoration of native salmonid habitat in northern Idaho, with those in other rivers of the region to infer potential drivers controlling water temperature. We found that the warmest rivers exhibited uniformly simplified physical structure, suggesting that thermal and physical degradation together may comprise a syndrome. The Priest River sites had approximately twice as many deep residual pools and incision that averaged twice that in the coldest rivers. Percentage fines and natural cover in the Priest were also more typical of the higher-temperature river groups. We found low instream cover and low levels of large wood both across the region and within the Priest River. This approach can help define attainable goals for management and restoration.