Integrating regional and local monitoring data and assessment tools to evaluate habitat conditions and inform river restoration.

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 then used principal components analysis to summarize the variation in several dimensions of physical habitat. We also 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. The warmest rivers had physical structure and fluvial characteristics typical of thermally degraded rivers, whereas the coldest rivers had higher mean summer flows and greater channel planform complexity. The Priest River sites had approximately twice as many deep residual pools (