Criteria for identifying free-flowing river stretches
Topics: EU Directives, How to do River Restoration, River continuity,
Regions: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Greater Europe, Published: 23-01-2026 , ISBN: EC Guidance Document No. 41 , Authors: Common Implementation Strategy for European Union Water Law
This technical document is intended to facilitate the implementation of EU legislation and is not legally binding. Any authoritative reading of the law should only be derived from applicable legal texts or principles. Only the Court of Justice of the European Union is competent to authoritatively interpret Union legislation.
Key elements of the approach to identify free-flowing rivers are {1} segmentation of the river in homogeneous reaches, {2) criteria for longitudinal, lateral and vertical connectivity wthin a homogneous reach, {3} minimum length criteria tp ensure hydromorphological processes and ecological functioning and (4) a large-scale assessment taking into account sediment connectivity and migration barriers for target fish species.
The guidance document outlines criteria for identifying free-flowing rivers by assessing their logitudional, lateral and vertical connectivity at local and catchment scale. The aim is to provide a toorl to calculate the increase of the length of free-flowing rivers resulting from restoration projects, contributing towards the EU target of of restoraing 25.000 km of free-flowing rivers by 2030