Stream Restoration News for April 30, 2008

A trio of coal companies has agreed to temporarily limit operations at three mountaintop removal mines opposed by environmentalists

Climate change adds twist to river restoration

Can the Chesapeake Bay survive the garbage choking Maryland's rivers? A really weird article because it's clear that the author talked to scientists who tried to explain the serious problems of sediments, nutrients, and stormwater, but she was most interested in talking about garbage.

Breach of a small dam near Columbia, MO leads to draining of a neighborhood lake and questions about how to restore the stream and who should ultimately be responsible

Ontario supports altered management of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River for more natural variation in flows However, some residents along the lake and river are opposed to the plan

As volunteers flock to the Charles River tomorrow for the annual spring clean up event, and paddlers arrive for the “Run of the Charles” canoe and kayak race, EPA water quality monitoring data show that during 2007, the Charles River had it’s best water quality for boating and swimming since the intensive Clean Charles Initiative began in 1995

Asarco and Atlantic Richfield Co. together will pay $37 million to state and federal agencies as part of the effort to clean up decades of mining waste in the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, MT, according to government officials.

Tempe, AZ has committed to preserving 159 acres in areas along the Salt River as a habitat for endangered and threatened animals

As far as I can tell, this AP story is quoting a Colorado College study as finding something about stream restoration projects in the US with numbers remarkably similar to those found by the NRRSS project several years ago (we found 37,000 total projects in our study, which focused only on certain regions of the US, and estimated $1 billion per year was being spent on restoration nationwide). If anybody knows more about the Colorado College study, I'd love to read it and see what their methods were. Or if this AP story is just wrong, we should probably let them know, since it's since been printed in almost every newspaper in the country.

Stream Restoration News for April 28, 2008

Paul Ziemkiewicz: Researcher's dirty job leads to clean streams Profile of the director of the West Virginia Water Resources Research Institute

Restoring riparian shade along some of Missouri's smaller spring-fed Ozark streams will likely benefit adult smallmouth bass growth and influence population sizes, University of Missouri researchers have found.

As coastal restoration concerns reached an all-time high after the 2005 hurricane season, Louisiana this year has missed out on a once-in-a-decade major flood event that could funnel much of the Mississippi River's fresh water and mud into the starved wetlands on the other side of the levees

On the Lehigh River (PA), shad and dams don't mix

Partners in the Penobscot River Restoration Project (ME) have been awarded a 2008 Cooperative Conservation Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior The award recognizes the unprecedented collaboration to restore 11 species of sea-run fish while rebalancing hydropower generated on the river.

Dairyland Power Cooperative has granted a conservation easement to Mississippi Valley Conservancy to permanently preserve 110 acres of Mississippi River bluffland near Alma, WI

The Animas River Stakeholders Group was recognized with the Department of the Interior's Cooperative Conservation Award today for significant improvements to water quality and aquatic habitat in Colorado's Animas River watershed The ARSG helped to bring about consensus among the diverse stakeholders on complex and costly cleanup efforts by providing a regular forum to explain the science behind decisions and organizing resources for voluntary mine reclamation.

From a waterfront park in New York's South Bronx, activist Majora Carter set out to use the 'green economy' to combat poverty Waterfront restoration and neighborhood greening as a force for social and economic change.

Stream Restoration News for April 25, 2008

Profile of Michigan Republican Congressman Vernon Ehlers who supports the Clean Water Restoration Act saying that conservation is a Republican value and this law will reinstate the original intent of the Clean Water Act.

Oil spill money is a boon to steelhead $1.2 million from Unocal enables creek restoration projects and trout census around San Luis Obispo, CA

Puget Sound: One man's indictment, love poem and call to arms

Project will help restore Little River herring runs near Gloucester, MA

New Mexico Governor Richardson announces efforts to protect the endangered Gila River The Gila was listed on American Rivers' top ten endangered waterways this year I'm still patiently awaiting North Carolina to respond to their listing of my hometown Catawba River (Western NC and SC) as the most endangered river in the country.

After more than a decade of planning and excavating one of the nation's largest dam removal and Superfund cleanup projects, a man-made channel was dredged open three weeks ago, allowing the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers to flow together again — for the first time in a century And now fish are swimming upstream of Missoula, MT.

Stream Restoration News for April 24, 2008

Florida state water managers could get 2,200 acres worth about $53 million in western Martin County for free to help clean water from Lake Okeechobee. But in return, the county and the state would have to allow the property owners, including a member of one of the richest families in the world, to mine half the land - digging 20-foot-deep pits for the next 20 years

A nice feature story about one of the bigger restoration projects going on right now: The Milltown Dam Breach and the Restoration of the Clark Fork River

The collapse of the California salmon stocks makes people wonder if it could happen on Washington's Columbia River

CREP II in Minnesota fell victim to rising land values and high commodity prices The CREP or Conservation Reserve Program grants were one of the earliest government funded programs to protect water quality from agricultural impacts

Sandbars built to help endangered birds survive on the Missouri River through South Dakota and work will start soon to build 8 new islands on the Mississippi through Minnesota to restore habitat lost to dredging

Mysterious decline of the Pacific lamprey, once considered a "trash fish", is now cause for concern

The blog West Virginia Blue speaks out strongly against the new federal mitigation guidelines especially as they relate to mountain-top removal/valley fill mining.

Stream Restoration News for April 18, 2008

An unusual restoration strategy: A Concord, MA resident is stocking exotic brown trout in the Assabet River to gain the support of anglers for more restoration of the river

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed a Donald Koch, a strong advocate for fish restoration, director of the California Department of Fish and Game More info from the Environment News Service

The Duluth (MN) News Tribune comes down in favor of restoration of the Great Lakes for economic, as well as environmental, reasons

Easy steps to successful wetland mitigations Some surprisingly practical advice from an environmental consulting firm--I especially like the emphasis on actually trying to do a good job and then monitoring to see if it worked.

The $620 million Kissimmee River (FL) restoration is about half-completed

None of the three remaining major-party candidates for president will rule out breaching dams to save Columbia and Snake river salmon. But they don't support dam breaching now, either Or, as one blogger puts it, "All candidates support inaction on Snake River." Here in NC, we're shocked to discover that people actually care what we think about the presidential primaries this year. Next week, I'll be attending a debate between the science advisors of the Democratic campaigns. Maybe I'll try to get this question in there.

Stream Restoration News for April 17, 2008

A profile of Kevin Bowers, founder of Maryland environmental consulting firm Biohabitats

Regulations on native brook trout streams may be threatening their survival in Pennsylvania

In Michigan, an "Ugly Rock Contest" to help build a fish ladder

Working to undo the damage to Massachusetts' Mill River and its estuary

Reclaiming New York's blighted waters

Salmon News:
Since I missed talking about the closing of the California chinook salmon fishery, here's a good summary: For the first time in history, recreational fishing boats in Santa Cruz, Moss Landing, Monterey, Morro Bay and other ports along the northern and central California Coast didn't go out fishing for chinook salmon on the traditional opening day of the season. The boats stayed in port on Saturday, April 5, due to an unprecedented emergency closure imposed by the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC)

A fisheries scientist still feels that the Klamath pact is key to recovering salmon

Federal officials have reached a settlement with four of five Northwest tribes that would leave hydroelectric dams in the Columbia Basin intact and commit federal agencies to spend $900 million on improving conditions for endangered salmon or, as a different newspaper puts it, "the Bonneville Power Administration will pay three northwest Indian tribes $900 million to drop a lawsuit over salmon protection". All scientists agree that removing the Snake River dams would help the salmon a lot more than all the other "restoration" practices currently being tried

Stream Restoration News for April 16, 2008

First, the city of Daphne, AL violated federal law and straightened and channelized a stream using federal Katrina recovery money. Then the city used their own money to attempt to restore the stream. Now, vandals have killed many of the trees planted as part of the stream restoration.

In another tale of municipalities and restoration, Orange County and St. Cloud, FL are fighting with state officials over proposals to draw water from a trio of lakes in the ecologically sensitive Kissimmee River basin, part of the headwaters for Florida's Everglades that we're all spending millions of dollars to restore.

Peer reviewers raise questions over Army Corps' Louisiana coastal restoration plans

The National Park Service Midwest Regional Office has announced the award of more than $153,000 in Challenge Cost Share Program grant funding for 2008, including funding for two projects in Arkansas to restore channel catfish and to implement a science research and environmental learning-center program

The British Columbia Ministry of Environment granted $4.5 million to theThe Tsolum River Restoration Society to remediate an old mine site that’s poisoning the river and nearly decimated fish stocks

A joint state-county project will turn a 1,250-acre tract of Wabash River flood plains near Terre Haute, IN into wetlands to create a magnet for wildlife and also control flooding.

The Ute Indian Tribe is supporting a proposal to dedicate over 3,200 acres of reservation land and at least 8,000 acre-feet of tribal water toward a wetlands mitigation project in the Uinta Basin, UT

Congress will soon be considering the Clean Water Restoration Act, which puts into clear language the recently overthrown historic interpretation of the Clean Water Act and brings all streams in the US back under federal protection. The Denver Post thinks it should pass

Stream Restoration News for April 14, 2008

Why restoration in a changing world is hard: A tiny snail that has been in Oregon for fourteen years may be the greatest threat facing Oregon's freshwater fish populations by outcompeting them for food

Chesapeake Bay Foundation says restoration is working on some Pennsylvania farm country streams But the Bay still gets bad grades for health

Repairing culverts in Alaska's Kenai Watershed is expected to have big benefits for salmon

The "Restoration Economy" beckons in Montana heralded by the breaching of the Milltown Dam on the Clark Fork River in Missoula site of the largest Superfund site in the country

Voi river in Taita-Taveta District, Kenya is set to be rehabilitated in an ambitious programme expected to cost Sh400 million

The age-old debate over Colorado’s most precious resource is poised to rage like the Poudre River in summertime

Stream Restoration News for April 12, 2008

Lots of folks are talking about the new federal compensatory mitigation guidelines. Some folks have a positive response (Lake Stewardship Blog) while some folks are pretty negative about the whole thing (Earthjustice (on Yuba.net)

The best word on it comes out of the West Virginia. As the Charleston Gazette reports, Federal Army Corps of Engineers officials (nor anybody else) have never seen a coal company (nor anybody else) successfully re-create a stream that was buried by mountain-top removal/valley fill mining. "But the agency moved to accept such unproven proposals as mitigation to offset the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining." West Virginia blogger Folkface has some humorous but true commentary

In an amusing twist on the guidelines' new emphasis on mitigation banking, three ag-preservation groups have joined forces against a highly controversial project that would convert 396 acres of prime farmland - part of a 776-acre dairy farm in the Nookachamps basin near Mount Vernon, WA - into a wetland mitigation bank

Everglades restoration could be hurt by state budget cuts, which in turn would impact the ability to get federal money

The California State Senate approved a bill designating $5.3 million in "urgent funding" for coastal salmon and steelhead restoration projects in California and Gov. Schwarzenegger signed it into law

A binational conference is being planned on restoring the rivers and wetlands along the US/Mexico border through Arizona Long considered primarily obstacles to border enforcement, these areas could also be areas of hope.

Finally, just because I think beaver are a great solution to most of our stream woes, Beaver, our partners in conservation

Dave Rosgen's Response

The big stream restoration news today is that Dave Rosgen has responded in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association to the serious critique of "Natural Channel Design" presented in the Simon et al article from the fall. His most impressive accomplishment is how little peer reviewed literature he cites. Of the references supporting "Natural Channel Design", they are either books written by him (not peer reviewed), presentations he gave (peer reviewed?), peer reviewed articles written by or with his PhD advisor, or peer reviewed articles written before his methodology was developed which he uses as post facto justification.

To provide some key quotes:
If the authors had better investigated and become more familiar with the methods in NCD, the majority of their dialog and conclusions would not have necessitated this discussion. The procedures that are referenced to in this discussion counter the inaccuracies made and were all available to these authors for their study prior to the article under discussion. Unfortunately, none of these authors have attended any advanced formal training courses offered or contacted me to inquire about the details of the methods in NCD that have been implemented for over two decades. (emphasis mine)

A two-week course is required to teach professionals (including individuals who have graduated from college with advanced degrees in engineering, geology, hydrology, fisheries, and geomorphology) how to conduct a watershed and stream channel stability analysis after having initial training in stream classification. Completion of 540 hours of study is required to learn the NCD method.

So, basically, Rosgen is saying that only those who have paid thousands of dollars to take his classes are qualified to critique him. How convenient for him. His other big point of support for his methods is that they have been used by federal agencies as standard protocol (hat tip to Steve Gough). If there are among my readers those who do not understand why this methodology is criticized and doubted, hopefully this makes it clearer. Good science should stand on its own in the peer reviewed literature, not require thousands of dollars payment for personal explanation from its inventor.

Stream Restoration News for April 1, 2008

The Army Corps and EPA yesterday issued new compensatory mitigation guidelines for streams and wetlands I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but the big change seems to be encouraging more standardization in plans and paperwork across all types of compensatory mitigation, and in particular to encourage mitigation banking because it requires projects to meet success standards before receiving mitigation credit. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

Milltown Dam, a 100-year-old landmark that came to symbolize the economic prosperity and environmental destruction of Montana's mining industry, came down Friday Blog coverage on Discovering Urbanism

Harrisonburg, VA officials are working on improving the city's polluted Blacks Run

Conservation groups are working to rescue Australia's river red gum Barmah Forest in the Murray-Darling River Basin

Engineers gave Epsom, NH residents little hope last week that the Suncook River would be returned to its former course following its channel shifting in March 2006 flooding

Thirsty Southern California cities are turning to water-rich farmers on the eastern edge of Riverside County for additional supplies to make up for the ongoing drought and other restrictions on the life-sustaining resource

Klamath op-ed: Any Klamath dam deal must provide water for fish and a counterpoint blog critique of the critics

Kentucky fishery officials plan to launch what they hope will be a 20-year program to restore lake sturgeon in the Cumberland River system

The blog Waterworlds (added to sidebar) has a nice write-up about Matt Kondolf's (UC-Berkeley) work on why stream restoration projects designed following Dave Rosgen's methods tend to fail To go along with that, Steve Gough sent me a link to the USFWS endorsement of Rosgen's methods and courses As Steve says, where's my free advertising?