Getting Restoration Right (Withouth the Swamp Rats)

One of the more surprising things I learned over the past years of developing restoration projects in the Hylebos is that the science of restoration is in its infancy. And there is a lot of money spent on restoration that isn't necessarily producing results. In yesterday's New York Times stream restoration gets a closer look and the writer accurately portrays a science that is just beginning to understand how little it really knows. 

In part because most projects are local and small scale, it is hard to say exactly how much Americans spend each year to restore rivers and streams. A group of academic researchers and government scientists, writing in Science in 2005, put the figure at well over $1 billion, for thousands of projects.

“an awful lot of stream restoration, if not the vast majority of it, has no empirical basis,” said William E. Dietrich, a geomorphologist at University of California, Berkeley, who studies rivers and streams. “It is being done intuitively, by looks, without strong evidence. The demand is in front of the knowledge.”

Here, at the Friends, we use the best technical experts we can find on our projects. We work to understand both what the landscape used to be, and what it can be in the future, given the limiting factors around it.

 

Project failure comes in many forms. Often, Dr. Dietrich said, people design projects in hopes of creating “a meandering channel with relatively low banks that look nice.” Then, he said, “a large storm can come through and completely wipe it out,” leaving shallow channels traveling around sandbars in multiple threads, what geologists call a braided channel.

 

“In most of those cases,” he added, “the restorer has taken a system that is naturally braided and forced it into a form. The channel simple defeated it by being its natural dynamic self.”

Most importantly, we've set up our organization to practice true adaptive management; we monitor and we learn from nature's response to our restoration activities. Monitoring is not necessarily a widespread practice. And funding is often difficult to come by.

David R. Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington, agreed. Monitoring “involves a lot of people and thought and expertise,” he said. “And you don’t have any new projects to show for it.”

As a result, the academic and government scientists said in their report, “Many opportunities to learn from successes and failures, and thus to improve future practice, are being lost.”

Our commitment at the Friends is to conserving and restoring the Hylebos Watershed. Each restoration project is evaluated for its ability to help us toward that goal. Funds for restoration are scarce, so we want to get it right it the first time. And we need to invest the time and financial commitment to project sites to be able to provide stewardship over several years after the initial project work is done. Only, then can we be certain that we've helped to restore natural function to the watershed.

I like to think that the work we're doing here in this little corner of urban Puget Sound is some of the most leading edge stream and wetland restoration around the region. When you volunteer or contribute to the Friends, you can be certain that your commitment to your watershed is effective and long-lasting.

More Invasive Species
it's sad, but college kids have actually started a drinking game that involves drinking every time the HyleBlog mentions an invasive species. I'm sorry to contribute to this debauchery, but I must report on the "swamp rat" reported in today's P-I. I don't know of any in the Hylebos but whatever's happening out there in Pugetopolis is likely to come our way eventually. Beware!