A review of assessment methods for river hydromorphology

The work leading to this paper has received funding for the EU’s FP7 under Grant Agreement No. 282656 (REFORM

A Rapid Physical Habitat Assessment of Wadeable Streams for Mixed-Land-Use Watersheds

Mitigating stream and river impairment is complex, particularly in mixed-land-use watersheds given the likelihood of integrated responses of stream restoration to coupled and ongoing terrestrial ecosystem disturbance and the need for periodic reassessment and maintenance. Traditional biological sampling (e.g., macroinvertebrate sampling or other biological indices) alone seldom identifies the cause of biological community impairment and large fiscal investments are often made with no apparent improvement to aquatic ecosystem health. A stream physical habitat assessment (PHA) can yield information that, when paired with land-use data may reveal causal patterns in aquatic physical habitat degradation and help to identify sites for rehabilitation or restoration. A rapid and customizable physical habitat assessment method (rPHA) is presented that reduces commonly high PHA time and labor costs while facilitating informative value. Sampling time is reduced to approximately 30–40 min per survey site with a crew of three individuals. The method is flexible and thus adaptable to varied applications and needs. The rPHA design facilitates replication at regular spatial and temporal intervals thereby informing land-use managers and agencies of current conditions and trends in habitat response to natural and anthropogenic stressors. The rPHA outcomes can thus provide science-based supplemental information to better inform management practices and stream restoration decisions in contemporary mixed-land-use watersheds

Catchment Care - Developing an Auction Process for Biodiversity and Water Quality Gains. Volume 2 - Appendices

A Market-Based Instrument Pilot Project. Report to the Onkaparinga Catchment Water Management Board.Water;Australia;Natural Resource Management;Catchment Care; auction, market-based instruments.

Contributions of local speech encoding and functional connectivity to audio-visual speech perception

Seeing a speaker’s face enhances speech intelligibility in adverse environments. We investigated the underlying network mechanisms by quantifying local speech representations and directed connectivity in MEG data obtained while human participants listened to speech of varying acoustic SNR and visual context. During high acoustic SNR speech encoding by temporally entrained brain activity was strong in temporal and inferior frontal cortex, while during low SNR strong entrainment emerged in premotor and superior frontal cortex. These changes in local encoding were accompanied by changes in directed connectivity along the ventral stream and the auditory-premotor axis. Importantly, the behavioral benefit arising from seeing the speaker’s face was not predicted by changes in local encoding but rather by enhanced functional connectivity between temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Our results demonstrate a role of auditory-frontal interactions in visual speech representations and suggest that functional connectivity along the ventral pathway facilitates speech comprehension in multisensory environments