Stream Restoration News for August 12, 2008

Resisting pressure to convert wetlands to agriculture is vital to avoid destroying ecosystems that provide a suite of services essential to humanity, including safe, steady local water supplies, preserving biodiversity and the large-scale capture and storage of climate warming greenhouse gases, according to seven hundred leading world experts in a week-long meeting in Cuiaba, Brazil

Meanwhile, in domestic wetlands news: A look at the business of wetland mitigation banking in Florida I love how a bank owner can just slip in statements like "The criticism that banks redistribute wetlands from urban to rural areas does not take into account the fact that the habitat function of wetlands is not served in an urban setting because of surrounding land development" and have them go unchallenged. For the record, 1)habitat is only one function of wetlands, 2)in urban areas, preserving every bit of habitat only becomes more important, 3)other functions of wetlands, particularly their ability to process stormwater and its accompanying nutrient loading also only become more important in an urban setting.

The chairmen of two influential congressional committees are challenging the basis being used by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency to determine “navigability” of the Santa Cruz and the Los Angeles rivers (CA). Such a determination has been necessary since the 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Rapanos, which reduced the authority of the Clean Water Act. Failure to get a navigability determination might mean that the act does not protect all or parts of a stream or any of its tributaries from potential polluters. All the more reason to get the Clean Water Restoration Act passed as soon as possible.

This looks like an interesting blog to follow, where a Chinese engineer chronicles his learning about stream restoration

Three dam removal projects chosen as state restoration priorities by Massachusetts

Topanga Creek near Malibu will be allowed to rise again and potentially become new steelhead habitat after years of abuse by neighbors worried about flooding left it a dry, filled in channel

The cleanup of the Neponset River (MA) is taking a huge step forward with the passage of a $1.7 billion environmental bond bill that includes $12 million for the restoration and remediation of the Lower Neponset River Watershed, to remove polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from the riverbed and waterway, which stretches through more than a dozen cities and towns.

Using clams to find sources of chemical contamination in streams