Abstract: There is a growing necessity to better understand the nature of the relationships between environmental attributes and freshwater species/communities to enable meaningful action to take place against the impacts of environmental change in river ecosystems. Such understanding would need to be based on the investigations of causal relationships rather than the study of statistical correlations or the use of expert opinion as is generally the case. Another issue is in identifying the scale(s) at which process and features should be recorded and assessed to enable the design of relevant monitoring programs. In this paper, we present a short review of existing knowledge on species/habitat relationships and discuss the importance of adequate theoretical frameworks for identifying environmental features of importance to wildlife and determining the scale/s at which they should be assessed. We further propose an approach for eliciting those relationships within the context of monitoring and management practice in conservation organisations. We show how conceptual models of habitat-species relationships can be built using existing knowledge and expert opinion and tested on data collected as part of existing monitoring programs. We suggest such framework, if applied, could not only help identify causal relationships between species, features and processes acting at various scales, but also initiate a knowledge acquisition process within organisations responsible for the delivery of the Water Framework Directive.

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