Learning from others and sharing lessons and experience from your own work improves best practice and may influence funding for similar schemes in the future.
Support and guidance
The RESTORE RiverWiki is a tool for sharing best practice and lessons learned. It showcases river restoration examples from across Europe in a Wikipedia website that anyone can freely add to and edit. It provides project data (including objectives, techniques and outcomes) as well as information on ecosystem benefits, stakeholder participation and costs.
Learning lessons from other's schemes and documenting your own for all to see
Users are encouraged to:
- Search for suitable examples to help plan your project.
- Submit your own project to celebrate your success.
- Discuss the benefits of using certain techniques and approaches.
You can draw upon evidence and information such as
green infrastructure guidance and strategies available at European, national and regional scales in order to develop your approach.
Evaluation should be included in the costs of a project to avoid it being overlooked.
Gathering evidence of success
Under the Water Framework Directive, statutory agencies are responsible for routinely monitoring watercourses, and it may be possible to use their data to evaluate the outcome of your project. In many EU countries, technical universities and academic institutions may also be able to support project appraisal. You may wish to monitor public perception or the cost-effectiveness of the scheme.
Benefits:
- Justifies the project spend.
- Effective way to demonstrate the benefits to clients, politicians and the general public.
- Outputs feed into future work and any modification to the project.
Sharing best practice
- How to share good practice
- Share project benefits with the public.
- Demonstrate the project work you have carried out to the public and interested stakeholders with site tours, seminars and exhibitions.
- Share information through industry accredited events and meetings.
- Add project to the RESTORE RiverWiki
Celebrating your successes
Benefits of communicating your project
- Increase in project exposure (awareness raising).
- Positive knock-on impact on available funding for similar schemes.
- Increased awareness of benefits of river restoration.
- May be used as an exemplar project or case study by other prospective developers.
- Continues to build the pool of available best practice for all to use.