Post-Project Appraisal in Hydromorphological River Restoration: Application to the Manzanares River at El Pardo (Madrid, Spain)

Post-project appraisal is a key component of river restoration scheme. It allows the success and failure of a project to be evaluated and provides essential information for proper adaptive management. This chapter presents a set of indicators whose objective is to evaluate the hydromorphological effectiveness of the actions included in the River Manzanares Restoration Project, in the area surrounding the Real Sitio de El Pardo (Madrid). All the proposed indicators evaluate variables indicative of processes, are based on the hydromorphological and ecological characteristics, have a precise and relatively simple estimation method, and their results are easily interpretable. The results obtained show the usefulness of the indicators (i) to evaluate the hydromorphological effect of the restoration actions carried out, (ii) as an adaptive management tool that will allow us to propose improvements and generate guidelines for other similar projects.