Stream Restoration News for August 4, 2008

As my reader(s?) can probably tell, I've had a busy summer. I have taken some time off, but I've also been happily doing a lot of field work this summer. We here in NC are not suffering nearly as severe a drought as we did last summer, thus water in the streams, thus stream ecology research getting done. Rest assured, as the summer winds down and I start spending more time in the lab, your daily dose of stream restoration news goodness will be returning on a more regular basis. In meantime, here are a few nuggets.

A reminder of how much education work we have to do: Toledo, OH will begin its efforts at restoring the urban Swan Creek by removing "logjams" Organic matter is of course the base of the foodweb and therefore one of the most important features of any forested or formerly forested stream. Removing all of this wood is a destruction of habitat and food resources, not a restoration. The lack of good public education on how stream ecosystems work is one reason discussing stream restoration with the general public is so difficult.

There are many places in the world, though--deserts, savannahs, plains, and prairies--where streams were not historically forested and restoration means removing the trees, as in this Minnesota prairie stream

Stream daylighting in downtown Athens, GA I did my master's at UGA and walked by (and on top of) this stream many times. It's a great story, both for the historical significance and for the approach taken in the daylighting: UGA planners did not try to map out the entire restoration before they started, said Jennifer Perissi, the landscape designer in UGA's grounds department who has coordinated the restoration. Instead, Perissi, Adams and others have taken it one step at a time, waiting as the stream revealed itself as workers removed the decades of debris that had accumulated in the area.

The Marmot Dam removal on the Sandy River in Oregon was used as an experiment to see what happens to legacy sediments after dam removal--in this case, half of the sediments have been worked through since October. It seems likely to me that whether to remove sediments before dam removal or leave them in place and let the river work through them will remain a case by case thing, depending on the geomorphology, hydrology, and overall ecological conditions of each river downstream of each dam removal.

Watershed management is stream restoration: eliminating eroding logging roads to save Olympic National Forest's Skokomish River

Here's a story I've never heard before: Ecological restoration of marijuana plantations on federal land

A Florida blogger considers the possibility of ever truly restoring the Everglades