Abstract :
[en] The fragmentation of habitats has been acknowledged for 30 years as one of the five main factors of biodiversity loss, in conjunction with pollution, overuse of natural resources, invasive species and climate change. Since then, public environmental policies have strived to restore the connectivity of natural habitats. That is particularly the case for water policy, which has made the ecological continuity of rivers a central element in policy planning, a quality element for monitoring programmes and one of the basic guidelines for river-basin management plans (RBMP). The time has thus come for decisions, with the resulting controversy given that any
attempt to modify existing discontinuities impacts our perception of landscapes and various uses of aquatic environments. Given that there is, on average, at least one obstacle for every five kilometres of river in continental France, this issue concerns the entire country, its population and all water managers. That explains why it was necessary to have a single set of standardised procedures for selecting the work to be done on the basis of objective and comparable data. For the ecological continuity of fish, we now have the ICE method presented in this book, which describes obstacles in rivers and assesses the capacity of fish to overcome those obstacles
during their upstream migration. The design, development and national deployment of this method required five years of intense, collective effort on the part of numerous scientists and the Onema local and regional offices. The method is the result of an outstanding multi-disciplinary approach involving both hydraulics and ecology, two disciplines that some people might see as irreconcilable, but that must work together synergistically in the effort to restore environments. The publication of this book in the Knowledge for action series marks the transition from the team that developed the method to the people who will use it to acquire better understanding of ecological continuity in
rivers and as an operational tool in implementing water policy and enhancing biodiversity.
