Wood Notes: It seems like something that has really captured the imagination with the Jordan River Project, as far as getting all the stakeholders involved, seemed the focus on the bird population. What are some other ways that you can capture peoples' imagination about a streamside restoration project?
Leah Graff: I would say that one big thing is education. Anything that can improve the river’s use as an education tool for students will really capture any community’s interest. Also recreational values, being able to canoe in the river, or having a trail alongside the river, that sort of thing is important to people.
Barbara White: In our area we have a group called Fairfax ReLeaf that is focused on restoring urban forests, and they do a lot of work generating volunteers to do riparian planting. And also in the Chesapeake Bay area, we have a lot of education going on through various forms concerning the need for riparian buffers in order to help the bay. In Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as west Virginia and new York, there is a concerted effort to increase riparian buffers, so the education component is being driven not just by us locally, but on a statewide and regionwide basis.
Wood Notes: It sounds as if an education component might sometimes be thought of as a frill in a project, but it’s actually integral to this type of project because it can capture the imagination of the community.
Barbara White: It's important to have education about the need for this to be done.
Karen Boyd: Inter-Fluve has some interesting projects that we’re developing, where the client has asked for education throughout the process. We complete a project phase—it might be refining the scope of work, for example—and then we get together and we say, "Okay, Step 1, this is how we approached it, here’s the decisions we had to make." Then after we do the data analysis and we figure out whether the system is in transition or what the instability issues are, then boom—we have another education component. Then we design it and we go out in the field, and during construction they come out and see it built. So it’s pretty exciting to see that happen.
Judy Okay: I wanted to give you some examples of tools that you can use. A nonprofit organization called The Terrene Institute, which works with agencies and the general public and corporations, distributes a watershed model that is molded so that it shows you all the various land uses in a watershed. You use put materials like cocoa or koolaid or fertilizer on bare soil areas (like a construction site or a field), and then you have the class spray the model with water. The water flows down into streams that are molded into the model, and you see the color of the stream change such as it does when it rains. It’s a very concrete way of showing students or adults how a watershed works.
They've developed a kit to go with that model, that would show you the value of riparian buffers. There are small trees, like you would have for model railroad scenery, inset in sponges. We set them on this watershed model in critical areas where there's a steep slope or pavement or a lot of residential, and when the water gets sprayed, these trees show the value of riparian buffers in terms of preserving habitat and water quality. We've found this tool useful because a lot of the general public don't know what the term "riparian" means.
Karen Boyd: I was working in Milwaukee a while ago, on a channel that was highly urbanized, and there were a couple of reaches that were quite well recovered in terms of channel stability and also the riparian environment. We just took a lot of photographs of that area and used it as a bit of a design template, let’s say. When we go to public meetings, we’ll show that as an example of a region that really shows some indicators of good geomorphic and riparian health, and people really like that, that tangible vision of what the ultimate product might be. A lot of systems don’t have it, but some certainly do.
Wood Notes: Trying for a before and after set of photographs?
Karen Boyd: Exactly. We walked through this region and said, "This looks like an after photo. This looks like what we’re trying to get."
Barbara White: It helps to give a picture of what the goal is.
Judy Okay: Something else you might consider, both while you’re doing a project and when you’re done with the project is signage. I think that signage is very important, describing what the project is, and a little bit of education, like "no mowing, this is a drainage area to a major waterway," or something along that line.
Urban factors
Wood Notes: What are some key factors that are different in an urban riparian restoration project, as opposed to a restoration project that is not in an urban area?
Leah Graff: One of the things that people need to worry about is storm drains. The storm drain systems can get really complicated, and they can change the way the watershed works, and which areas are going to be draining into the area of the river. It might not be what you would think from looking at a map.
Barbara White: The volume and velocity of water in an urban area is so much higher because of storm drains.
Karen Boyd: Speaking as a geomorphologist who has worked in some urban systems, some of the common mistakes that we see is that when people look at the hydrology, they want as much information as they can—so they will use the whole period of record and not look at how the urbanization has affected the hydrology. And as a result, the design basis that they are working off of is not really representing existing conditions. I think another huge problem in urban environments is just fundamental encroachment—you just don’t have much room to work in. And it’s hard to regain some of that area. Sometimes we’ve been able to do that, but more commonly than not, we’re working in very confined spaces
Barbara White: A lot of times you have a hard time with the fact that the land ownership is all chopped up as far as from one side of the stream to the other and during the length of the stream. You've got so many different land owners.
Judy Okay: And you also have to be very careful of utilities, because generally the sewers and some of your utilities run parallel to the stream in the buffer area and you may not be allowed to plant in those areas.
Karen Boyd: You also need to think about the regulatory aspects. We might be doing a restoration project on an urban stream and one of the criteria is that we cannot alter the water surface profile and affect flooding distributions, so it can be very hard to go in and put in a riparian buffer when that might affect the given areas that might be flooded.
Steve Dickens: This is related to another issue. We seem to have to educate our groups more and more about how streams naturally change their channels in a process that occurs within a time frame of 10-year periods. So we need to look at that to be able to get a sense of what the natural course of a stream would be. A lot of groups in rural areas may feel they have a problem, and basically the problem that they’re identifying has to do with the natural course that the stream would take in terms of erosion and change. It's important to help people to understand this that so the restoration projects are really focused in areas where there has been human alteration that is causing a problem, versus natural changes.
Judy Okay: And the infrastructure such as paths and bridges and things of that sort in urban areas keep the stream from being able to use the dynamics that you usually see in a stream in an open area. They’re not allowed to meander. That’s one of the problems that we’ve come up against is that a lot of these things that are called "restoration," are actually natural phenomena for the stream. But it’s not allowed to do that in an urban area, because someone has put a path beside it or because there is a bridge there, and so something has to be done to hold it within the pattern that it’s in right now . . .
Barbara White: . . . rather than allowing it to change as it normally would. In a rural area sometimes you can get away with allowing it to change, but sometimes it’s taking someone’s pasture, or the stream is the border between the properties, and they don’t want it to change.
Karen Boyd: That’s something that we address commonly. We first come up with goals and objectives based upon the client’s and the community’s vision, and then the next step is to say, "Okay, well let’s look at our limitations, let’s look at our physical limitations and our political limitations, and let’s make sure these are realistic objectives, and then modify them accordingly." Because it’s true, a lot of times restoration being "returning to some previous state," it’s just not going to happen in an urban setting.
Leah Graff: That previous state may not be stable anymore.
Karen Boyd: That’s right.
