Habitat Assessment & Wetland Delineation

Methods of Habitat Assessment

JEC and colleagues literally wrote the book on aquatic habitat assessment in Colorado, developing the Functional Assessment of Colorado Wetlands (FACWet), used in the administration of the Clean Water Act and The Functional Assessment of Colorado Streams.  From those came the City of Fort Collins River Health Assessment Framework, State of the Poudre Report Card, State of the Upper Poudre and others. Others needed a river health assessment for their own stream management planning, so that led Mark Beardsley and I to develop a webinar explaining our general approach under the name of the CO Stream Health Assessment Framework (CoSHAF). The popularity and utility of the approach (with a slight name change) led to the CoRHAF being adopted by the State in the Colorado Water Plan.

Delineating wetland boundaries is a bread-and-butter activity for a wetland professional, but it is a really important one, often with substantial financial implications.  Learning the nuances of the delineating wetlands was a natural outgrowth of my work with the US Army Corps of Engineers developing technical tools for the Clean Water Act program.  I was fortunate to have their expert guidance and years of productive collaboration that was most rewarding, for example, together we published an article on a method to delineate wetlands under difficult conditions, and I assisted in their national delineation training (Reg 4) courses.