Ecological information and habitat rehabilitation Lubinski, K. S., and S. Gutreuter. 1993. Ecological information and habitat rehabilitation on the Upper Mississippi River. Pages 87-100 in L. W. Hesse, C. B. Stalnaker, N. G. Benson, and J. R. Zuboy, editors. Proceedings of the Symposium, Restoration Planning for the Rivers of the Mississippi River Ecosystem, National Biological Survey, Washington, D.C. Biological Report 19. Reprinted by the National Biological Survey, Environmental Management Technical Center, Onalaska, Wisconsin, December 1994. LTRMP 94-R010. 14 pp. (NTIS #PB95- 169413) ABSTRACT Habitat rehabilitation is one of several alternatives available to a river management agency. Costs to rehabilitate even small areas of a system as large and complex as the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) are high. During the course of planning and implementing rehabilitation projects, certain pieces of critical information need to be identified and accessed. Items of information fall into four categories: system objectives and action levels, system status, causal factors, and evaluations of management alternatives. We use examples from the environmental and management history of the UMR to demonstrate the roles of these pieces of information in the management process and especially how they relate to decision making for habitat rehabilitation. Few management plans have included measurable, ecologically based objectives and action levels, partly because of the difficulty of delineating the limits of the UMR ecosystem, the lack of useful ecological criteria, and fragmentation of management responsibilities. System status of the UMR is generally well known, but not in terms that can be quantitatively compared with objectives or action levels. The most difficult pieces of information to obtain fall in the category of causal factors. Information about causal factors is especially difficult to apply to projects on large rivers because of their dynamic nature, structural heterogeneity, and susceptibility to unpredictable interactions among many factors. Ongoing habitat rehabilitation projects on the UMR provide examples of the last information category. Most current projects address the problem of sedimentation. Two completed projects have shown different levels of success. Incomplete information about causal factors has been implicated in the lack of success of one project. Review of the critical information needed to take management action and acquisition of missing information will help increase the probability of success of future rehabilitation projects. KEYWORDS Mississippi River, rivers, habitat, restoration, rehabilitation, ecosystem, objectives, habitat rehabilitation, information, objectives, monitoring decision making, Upper Mississippi River System