The U.S. has 3.5 million miles of rivers. Many of these rivers support multiple uses, such as drinking water supply, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation, flood prevention and erosion control, and many of them run right through our cities and towns.
Historically, people have often settled by rivers and streams, for the obvious reasons—drinking water, crops, the beauty and coolness of flowing water, to name a few. But the close proximity of buildings, people, and waterways has not always been a good combination. Land clearing for roads, crops, and building sites can result in removal of the natural vegetation that grow along a streambed—often called the riparian buffer. Without this buffer of trees, shrubs, and other vegetation, the banks of streams and rivers erode and become unstable. All this, plus other changes caused by the urban environment, can result threaten fish and other aquatic life that depends on the stream. An unhealthy stream is often choked with sand and silt, and a conduit for polluted water.
Yet interest in restoring stream corridors is growing, as streams are recognized as critical ecosystems that support a number of values and uses. Restoring the riparian buffer is an effort that intersects with other urban forestry projects, but it's different in a number of important ways. To learn more about riparian restoration, we gathered some experts together for a discussion on dos and don'ts, how groups decide to undertake a project like this, and . . . how do you restore the health of a stream, anyway?
Our participants were:
- Karen Boyd, from Inter-Fluve (bio)
- Steve Dickens, from River Watch (bio)
- Leah Graff, from Save Our Streams (bio)
- Vaughn Lovejoy, from the Jordan River Restoration Project (bio)
- Judy Okay, from the Virginia Department of Forestry (bio)
- Elise Peterson, from the Jordan River Restoration Project (bio)
- Barbara White, from the Virginia Department of Forestry (bio)
Wood Notes: Let’s start with some dos and don'ts for groups who want to get involved in a river restoration project.
Steve Dickens: There are a lot of organizational dos and don’ts, but one of the things that is our greatest concern is—is there going to be an evaluation component of the project? To us at River Watch, that means doing some monitoring . . . water quality monitoring and/or surveying what’s going on upstream and downstream. We think that’s important in terms of not only being able to discern whether the project is being effective, but also understanding what’s going on the stream and determining if such a project even makes sense to begin with. This means the project happens in the context of a specific problem that’s been identified, not because somebody just says, "Oh, this bank looks like it needs help."
Wood Notes: How does a group usually end up deciding they want to do a riparian restoration project? Is it usually because a group or an individual notices something that looks bad, or is it usually on the basis of formal water quality monitoring?
Barbara White: In my work with the Virginia Department of Forestry as we’ve been doing riparian restoration, we initially did just seedling plantings—to improve the riparian buffer. We then realized that because we’re in one of the most urban counties in the nation, and because of the volumes and velocities of water, that a lot of times seedling plantings weren’t going to be sufficient to really take care of the problem. So we’ve gotten into doing some streambank restoration, when it’s going to be a viable solution to the problem. You really have to look into the whole situation…you can’t just see a bank that’s bad and go in and fix that bank. You have to look upstream and downstream and see what the whole situation.
Judy Okay: One of the things that happens is that people usually call into our office and say, "We have a problem, the banks are eroding, we’re losing property, we’re losing a lot of trees," and so we go out and do sort of a field survey of what the situation is and then look at the monitoring and things of that sort.
Leah Graff: You look into the stream morphology.
Judy Okay: Yes.
Barbara White: Mostly it’s a homeowner’s association or a group like that, sometimes it’s an individual who requests it.
Wood Notes: Are there some groups that do water monitoring first, and then choose to do a restoration project on the basis of that?
Steve Dickens: Our experience is that groups are all over the place in terms of how they approach it. We’ve got groups that have done probably 5-10 years of monitoring and now are beginning to tackle different restoration activities, and other groups that have done virtually no monitoring and are beginning to tackle projects.
Leah Graff: As far as how people decide that they want to do a restoration project, I would agree that often it’s individuals or groups who see a problem on a streambank. Even if they start with water monitoring they often don’t get into restoration until they’re out there monitoring and they see something—people have to actually see the stream to see that there’s a problem there. I think that brings us into things that people need to think about when they’re starting a project. One of the first things they need to do is gather information, looking at what’s going on in the entire watershed. They also need to try to get as many stakeholders involved—get the local government involved, get other property owners along the stream and the watershed involved, and try to get some expertise involved in there somewhere, too.
Karen Boyd: One thing that we see that’s not done early in the process, that really needs to be done, is that you need to define your goals and objectives for the project, and you need to get consensus on those goals and objectives. Later on, you'll have to make a lot of decisions, and if you make those goals and objectives very discrete, it really streamlines the decision-making process later on. A detailed plan helps you define your criteria for design, and it also helps you determine whether or not your project is actually successful, because that depends on what your objective was. For example, if you do a restoration project and the following year you have a 100-year flood and it blows out your project, was that a failure? Well, it was probably a failure if you said one of your objectives was to survive a 100-year event. If your objective was habitat enhancement, then it probably wasn’t a failure.
Leah Graff: A clear set of goals can also help you set priorities later as well . . . if you have limited funds and resources, the first place to look is your list of goals.
Barbara White: I think it’s very important to be aware of what to monitor—because sometimes people in our area are monitoring macroinvertebrates in the water, but they are not monitoring the actual streambank degradation, or the riparian buffer or any of those other aspects . . . whereas all those other aspects are part of the picture.
Leah Graff: I have a question about that, Barbara. When people are doing macroinvertebrate surveys, and they determine on the basis of that survey that the water quality is poor, do they then try to go ahead and do something about that?
Judy Okay: When you look at macroinvertebrates, what you’re looking at is the water temperature, the amount of sediment, the nutrients in the water. Those are the things that macroinvertebrates usually tell you something about, but they don’t tell you how many trees are downed in the area and they don’t tell you the depth of the undercutting. And we've also found that they’re a little bit skewed sometimes in urban areas, depending on the animal population and things of that sort that affect water quality, but really don’t have a whole lot to do with the actual stream itself. So you have to be sure that if your goals are to help with the restoration and repair on a stream, and it’s the morphology of the stream you’re concerned with, you would look at different things to monitor than you would if you’re looking at the water quality. Ultimately water quality will be improved with a streambank restoration, because sediment load should be down, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to affect the nutrient load or some of the other things that will affect the macroinvertebrates.
Wood Notes: It sounds like we could probably all agree on some things to monitor and around which to set goals, which would include water quality—maybe as measured by macroivertebrates—and also streambank degradation. But it sounds like groups sometimes measure one or the other, but not both. And there are probably other things to look at as well.
Judy Okay: The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, in Washington, DC has someone named John Galley who has developed a protocol called the RSAT—Rapid Stream Assessment Technique. What he does is look at macroinvertebrates to some extent, and then he’ll go in and measure the width of the stream and the depth of the water, he’ll look at the number of downed trees, and so forth. It's a rapid assessment, it’s not something that you can actually base a restoration on, but that might help you decide whether or not you should be doing something.
Wood Notes: Vaughn and Elise, what are some of the factors that led to the start of the Jordan River Restoration Project that you're involved in? Tell us a little about that project.
Elise Peterson: With the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we’ve embarked on a large restoration project in Salt Lake City on the Jordan river, and it's definitely an urban restoration. It's interesting listening to the water quality discussions that have been going on—one of the triggers for this restoration, and the involvement of the Fish and Wildlife Service in it, has been a natural resource damage assessment settlement which was received from the Sharon Steel Superfund Site. So it was all triggered by water quality and damages from heavy metals that were entering the stream and degrading the downstream riparian zone. That’s kind of what got us involved, and with that as the catalyst, we have been able to pull in several partners, Tree Utah being one of them, the local Audubon chapter, other Federal funds, EPA funds, to move forward to try and restore different segments of the stream.
Vaughn Lovejoy: The focus of this is to create the vegetation community to support bird populations, because in the intermountain west the streamside communities are absolutely critical habitats for neotropical migrant birds. The hope is that 20 years down the road we will have established enough habitat to bring back some of these breeding neotropical migrant birds into this area.
Next . . . the importance of education