Protecting healthy streams is an important yet oft under-considered aspect of watershed management. Most assessment and management programs focus on identifying “impairments”, diagnosing potential causes of those impairments, and developing remedial strategies. California has initiated a project to complement existing impairment focused by identifying healthy streams statewide, determining risk factors to these streams and developing protective strategies aimed at keeping healthy streams healthy. We will provide an overview of this approach – termed Protective Assessment – and the tools being developed to support this effort. Protective Assessment builds upon the concepts of Causal Assessment, such as those developed by USEPA under the CADDIS program and uses data from existing bioassessment programs, including California’s Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program Bioassessment Program, to provide site-specific insights on vulnerabilities facing individual streams. The assessment tools evaluate a suite of common stressors, such as altered flow, altered habitat and eutrophication. Each stressor is evaluated as either a high, medium or low risk to the stream maintaining its high-quality biological status. The Protective Assessment tools are being designed to help managers take informed, stressor-specific actions to prevent these streams from degrading in the present and near future. The tools will be housed on a publicly accessible, interactive web dashboard that presents users with a range of analysis capabilities, from summaries to detailed outputs about the threats that different stressors pose to individual streams and stream segments.