Physical+habitat+2

**PHYSICAL HABITAT OUTLINE**
Mark's Comments - **Looks awesome**. Let's pull your references onto this page and just have one page for physical habitat. I've made a few comments below but I think you two are headed in the right direction. Your topic should have a lot of links to other Wiki pages on our site as well (e.g. environmental flows, hydraulics, floodplain connectivity, etc.).]

Objective: The objective of this paper is to define physical habitat and to explore how alterations to a river system’s structure and flow patterns affect the habitat and the aquatic species that exist within. Now that the attitude in the Western U.S. has started to shift from a focus on established minimum flows to an awareness of the importance of seasonal flows, we need to evaluate how alterations in environmental flows will affect river biota - specifically fish and riparian species.


 * Defining physical habitat
 * What is physical habitat?
 * Flow regime
 * Physical structure of the channel
 * How is physical habitat an indicator of river health?
 * Brief history of the study of physical habitat
 * How has the understanding of physical habitat evolved over the last 20 to 30 years?
 * This will be discussed in more depth later in the paper
 * Physical habitat scales - critical component of physical habitat assessment
 * Microhabitat - zones of varying substrates, water depths, and velocities
 * Mesohabitat/Macrohabitat - riffles, pools, and cascades
 * Watershed
 * How do these different scales apply to the Middle Rio Grande?
 * River system degradation
 * What are the primary causes of stream and river degradation (in a general sense and specifically along the Rio Grande)?
 * Channel modification/River Engineering
 * Hydro-modifications
 * Watershed development
 * In altering a stream's environmental flows, how are we altering the physical habitat and how are aquatic species - specifically fish - affected?
 * How are we affecting riparian processes?
 * How does fragmentation and loss of connectivity within a watershed affect the overall system and physical habitat?
 * Physical habitat assessment
 * PHABSIM – Physical Habitat Simulation System
 * Define PHABSIM, its history, and its use in water resources management
 * A technique that allows for quantitative analysis of physical habitat
 * Can model a system based on different flow scenarios and key habitat characteristics that include depth, velocity, and substrate
 * IFIM - Instream Flow Incremental Methodology
 * Define IFIM, its history, and its use in water resources management
 * “Water management problem solving has matured from setting fixed minimum flows with no linkage to a specific aquatic habitat benefit to incremental methods in which aquatic habitats are quantified as a function of discharge.” - USGS
 * Energetics
 * And lets brainstorm on others....
 * Policies related to physical habitat
 * Brief summary of state-by-state approaches in the western U.S.
 * NEPA
 * Water budgets
 * Discussion
 * How are the tools discussed above currently being used to assess river health?
 * What can we do to encourage increased use of available tools?
 * How are assessment methods utilized in the MRG? If they’re not currently being implemented, how would they be useful?