Stream Restoration News for May 14, 2008

Not a lot of news these days for me to pick from. Here are a few nuggets...

A new twist on an old idea: A new company in Seattle is pitching a scheme which essentially appears to be mitigation banking on public land, renting the land from the government, performing restoration, and then charging destructive industries for mitigation credit

Also in Seattle, paying landowners to protect Puget Sound

Revival of defunct Orono hydropower plant to restore fish passage on Penobscot River

The farm bill which recently passed Congress includes money for water conservation including $440 million for Chesapeake Bay

Channel reconstruction on a small tributary to the Blackfoot River in Montana “If people aren't used to seeing this work, it's kind of shocking - turning a stream into a construction site - but they've been so degraded that they're not functioning normally by any measure,” Pierce said. “It'll be a whole new stream when we're done.” No word on whether the whole new stream will actually function more normally than the one that was there before.

Work has begun to restore a section of stream near, and in collaboration with, Appalachian State University (NC)

Sandra Postel on water and international development: The Forgotten Infrastructure: Safeguarding Freshwater Ecosystems

American Rivers Blog offers tips on taking better photos of restoration projects

Stream Restoration News for May 16, 2008

A fewl stories today that aren't really about stream restoration, but have clear implications for it:
Environmental regulations, including wetland mitigation rules, are murky on tribal land

Broken promises in saving Washington's wetlands--includes some good stuff about how wetlands created as mitigation aren't the same as those that were destroyed

Restoring fish populations leads to tough choice for Great Lakes gulls

Civil society in Asia should relentlessly engage businesses in finding ways to prevent water, land, air and vegetation pollution

Stream Restoration News for May 14, 2008

The SC Department of Natural Resources stocked approximately 25,000 marked American shad fry in the Broad River on last week, marking the beginning of a much larger scale restoration effort to stock millions of American shad fry per year in the Broad and Santee River systems in an attempt to restore South Carolina's most economically important fin fish.

Scientists are starting to see results in the Kissimmee River (FL) restoration as bird populations in particular are recovering.

The Los Angeles River: Intro to a Case Study in Urban Revitalization

Riverkeeper, the #1 protector of the Hudson River, is also the lead watch-dog of NYC’s water supply

How development destroys headwater streams and does other damage to Puget Sound, and the possibilities of restoration and, interestingly, a similar article about Chesapeake Bay

Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News provides a nice summary of all of the bills moving through the Senate Natural Resources Committee, including a number having to do with river restoration and preservation

Stream Restoration News for May 13, 2008

As I feared, a number of people are spinning the Kaushal et al study I discussed last week as showing stream restoration removes nitrate, when, as I argued last week, it really shows that in one stream in Baltimore stream restoration may have increased denitrification. The problem seems to be this Science News article which in my opinion vastly overstates the potential management implications of this study--it's a long way from their results to saying we can quantify or predict the effects of any other restoration project on nitrate loading. See A DC Birding Blog and Greener Loudon

The Ithaca (NY) Town Planning board discusses wetlands protection and wind energy It appears the Ithaca Town Planning Board understands hydrology better than the US Supreme Court.

It's a good year for herring, the first in a long while, in Massachusetts Bay

Taking back Vermont's Housatonic River from General Electric

A key Senate committee last week handily approved a revised but still ambitious bill to restore the San Joaquin River Also in the Central Valley Business Times

The Port of Seattle is developing a plan to restore habitat on property it owns along the Lower Duwamish River

Conservationists in Kenya are opposing a multi-million dollar biofuels project citing threats to bird life abundant in a riverine delta area The 50,000 acre sugar cane project was meant to provide raw cane for a giant sugar milling company too but it is believed its vision was more for biofuel than food.

Stream Restoration News for May 8, 2008

The Ute team up with some rural Utah residents to oppose a large wetland creation project The opposition seems to center on the use of eminent domain to acquire the land and possibly a fear of West Nile virus, although it's not clear how serious those fears are. The article doesn't make it clear that this is a mitigation project or what it is mitigating for.

A mitigation bank whose credits have all been sold could become a city park in Vero Beach, FL

Planting trees to shade out reed canary grass in Oregon's Columbia River basin

In South Florida, a reservoir larger than Manhattan is being planned to help the Everglades

The Bush administration Monday issued its final court-ordered plans for making Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects safe for endangered salmon

Water Supply and Storage Co. has agreed to pay $9 million for damages to natural resources in Rocky Mountain National Park five years ago to restore areas within the park that were damaged by the breach of the Grand River Ditch, which caused more than 60,000 cubic yards of sediment to flow into the upper Colorado River and associated wetlands.

Restoration efforts will have to be stepped up before Chesapeake Bay's health significantly improves

After the horrible news of the crash of the Pacific Coast salmon runs, here are Five Good Salmon News Headlines

Stream Restoration News for May 5, 2008

A new study out in the journal Ecological Applications found that a stream restoration project increased denitrification in one stream reach in Baltimore, MD. Although I know some of the authors, and they are very optimistic about the potential of stream restoration to aid in removal of excess nitrogen, I have a couple of problems with this study. First, they compare denitrification rates following restoration to those in an unrestored reach downstream--they didn't measure denitrification before the stream was restored so they have no way to know if restoration actually increased denitrification rates in that reach, just that they are higher than in a reach presumed to be similar to the prerestoration conditions. This is a common problem in studies of stream restoration (including my own) because it is rare for researchers to hear about projects well enough ahead of time to collect pre-restoration data. Even if stream restoration did increase denitrification at this particular site, this is still one stream restoration project in one reach in one stream in Maryland and no other published study that I'm aware of has seen similar results, while several have seen no significant increase in denitrification. Until there is more evidence, I still think better strategies involve keeping the nitrogen out of the stream in the first place.

I don't think I mentioned it last week, but on Thursday, May 1 all salmon fishing was banned on the US Pacific coast. This obviously has huge financial implications, as well as suggesting that one of the consistently best organized and funded, popularly supported, massive restoration projects in the country is not working because of factors that are not well understood.

In other salmon news, the leaders of four American Indian tribes and federal hydropower regulators on Friday celebrated a landmark agreement intended to improve fish runs in the Pacific Northwest, just days before a deadline for a new regional salmon recovery plan

Projected reductions in the Poudre River's flow through Fort Collins, CO in a federal analysis of a new reservoir took both sides of the debate by surprise A good summary of the pros and cons listed in the draft In an op-ed, a civil engineer complains about "biased coverage" of the controversy, taking what feels like a cognitively dissonant approach, advocating for restoration downstream of the reservoir as well as for construction of the reservoir. But I guess both approaches are good for the civil engineering business.

Wetlands restoration money will go to help reduce flooding in Austin, TX

American Rivers blog has a post about post-restoration monitoring and the herring warden

Stream Restoration News for May 2, 2008

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has announced the expansion of my stream restoration alma mater--the Maryland Conservation Corps (MCC) – the state’s award winning AmeriCorps program– to include a summer job program for underserved and court-involved youth The program maintains the state's parks, provides environmental education programming, and performs ecosystem restoration and management throughout the state. My year in MCC got me fascinated by stream restoration and made me want to go to grad school to learn more.

Stocking of baby Atlantic Salmon in New Hampshire's Upper Pemigewasset River

Engineering for man: shaping the Mississippi River

New reefs will help sturgeon thrive again in Detroit River, MI

The Florida House of Representatives unanimously passed House Memorial 1131, sponsored by Rep. Gayle Harrell, (R) Port St. Lucie, sending a strong message to the Congress of the United States, urging Congress to fully fund the implementation of the Indian River Lagoon South Restoration Project, the first phase of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), as authorized in the Water Resources Development Act of 2007

It seems almost unbelievable: A slender, 3-foot-long, three-year-old rainbow trout recently swam from Montana’s Clark Fork River to spawning grounds in the Big Blackfoot River. The trout is the first in more than 100 years to heed the ancient call to ascend beyond the confluence of these rivers.

A nice diary on salmon restoration and dam removal on Daily Kos of all places

Extraordinary effort to save the endangered Barrens topminnow in Tennessee

An assembly of the nation’s leading authorities on aquatic conservation unveiled the 2008 “10 Waters to Watch” list, a collection of rivers, streams and shores that will be cleaner and healthier habitats for the many fish and wildlife species and people who call these areas home