Streambank Bioengineering: Riparian Zone Restoration Techniques

[00:00:00]okay welcome everybody to uh the first in our webinar series with julie vanderwaal and chris hogue uh before we get started i wanted to say a quick thank you to all of our sponsors who have made this webinar possible uh snake river salmon recovery board derby canyon natives mountains to sound greenway tetra tech uh department of ecology okanagan conservation district and of course my employer yakima basin fish and wildlife recovery board without their support we wouldn't be able to host webinars like these so let's jump right in julie vanderwaal has worked at the intersection of environmental science and education for over 20 years she holds degrees in environmental technology from the british columbia institute of technology and child development and education from bar style college julie has taught in outdoor and ecological education and public school contexts working with all ages in southern british columbia northern california southeastern quebec and north central washington she worked for a decade as conservation coordinator for the okanagan highlands alliance coordinating education and restoration programs and as part of that work she led riparian planting in a system dominated by reed canary grass and managed bda based restoration that successfully upgraded a deeply inside stream bed the team's evolution of the bda weaving technique inspired her to pursue hybridizing bda methods with established bioengineering treatments which led her to collaboration with chris hogue on other projects she currently teaches stem for the oracle junior and senior high school in okanagan county and is excited to involve students in stream restoration on a deeper level chris hogue has been working on riparian and wetland systems for over 40 years he's the author of over 120 technical papers on applied planting techniques for riparian and wetland ecosystems he's been working with streambank soil bioengineering techniques for 37 years and he has developed two practical field manuals on bioengineering and over 100 papers describing these techniques how to install them materials needed management after installation and what zones riparian plants go in chris was formerly the project leader of the interagency riparian and wetland plant development project with usda nrcs plant materials center in aberdeen idaho he retired at the end of 2009 and opened up a small consulting business he's worked taught and consulted all over the us canada mexico and made two trips to afghanistan to provide technical assistance to the afghan ministry of forest and range thank you so much for uh joining us chris and julie and with that i will turn it over to you great thank you so let me just share my screen here okay thanks so much for that welcome trisha uh chris and i are both really excited to be here today yeah thanks uh for everybody to have us there and we're excited to present this webinar to you and we're hoping that we can get lots of feedback from you to continue on with some other webinars that would meet your experian needs all right so looking at our outline for today we're going to talk about the context for bioengineering and we know that a lot of folks are practitioners who are very involved working in riparian areas so we're going to take a chance to appreciate riparian zones together and the functions of those zones then we'll take a look at the principles of bioengineering and then we'll provide a bioengineering technique teaser with potential future webinar topic ideas so please be listening for those ideas that you might be most interested in learning more about because we'll send out a survey and you'll be able to let us know what you'd like to learn more about in the future and then we'll close with a question and answer period so just for starters you know we have non-fiction we have fiction and in between we have taken out of context and we've all been there before so we wanted to start by looking at the context for bioengineering so first some things to consider all channels change so right here we're looking at um triple creek which is a project of the okanagan highlands alliance on your chit saw and it's just an image showing us how systems are very dynamic and they're always changing and here we're seeing the platform change in response to an installation that was done one of the things that i'd mention here is that remember that you're looking at the entire zone sometimes we get so concentrated on bank erosion or meander reform reformization or things like that and so it's important that you think about the whole zone and how what kind of plants are in the zone and so that as the stream moves a little bit you have that zone to buffer how far it moves and how fast it moves right so other things to consider even with an established system periodic bank erosion will occur that is the nature of rivers and that's something that we that you have to remember is that rivers do move and and remember that not all the the plants in the world will hold it in one place it's going to move in throughout the vegetation of the zone and that's why we want to make sure that the zone is well established as a good root system and we also want to keep in mind that sometimes erosion is needed in order to meet our objectives so soil bioengineering treatments will not be as static as traditional engineered bank stabilization projects an example of this is the is this particular uh shoot a concrete chute for the colfax river that goes right through the town of colfax washington and they had to put it in the concrete chute because of course the river goes right through the middle of town and you have houses and businesses and parks and all kinds of things that uh they don't want that destroyed by the river so when you do this uh of course there is no um structure there that is built for reducing the velocity and the energy of the water as it goes into the chute um we don't have the other uh functions that that a riparian zone gives us uh and so when the water goes through it just uh rips through and you gotta remember as it goes through it gets faster and it comes out the other end and you have to be prepared for what's gonna happen when it comes out that other end because it's got a lot of energy it's just going to blow out so it takes a lot of effort to build something that can handle that kind of energy right so another thing to consider with bioengineering rather than staying the same bioengineering treatments are more dynamic and they're always evolving with the stream system so we've got we have several examples this is a one that i really like this is called the winooski river project this is in the winooski river watershed in vermont in the early 1930s and this watershed had it was mainly dairy farms and it had a series of big storms that went through and eroded the river and the banks and and caused millions and millions of dollars of damage so the landowners got together and they said we want to put in some treatments that aren't just rock we want to try some bio engineering treatments and so a whole design was put together and on the left hand side you can see what it looked like as the banks were shaped a little bit before the installation uh the next the middle slide would be about two to three years after it was installed and the last slide is about 1995 so you can see that it's really growing in and and provides significant protection to the roads and the buildings up above on the bank and here's another example where we don't have infrastructure that needs to be protected no roads no banks that were worried about erosion on in fact on this site we needed to increase the length of the stream in order to move toward a more stable system in order to be able to a grade an incise channel and so here you're just seeing the treatment evolving with the system and the stream is going around the treatments and there's kind of a biofeedback loop that starts as the stream responds to the treatments the treatments respond to the stream and we're seeing really incredible change there in just a few short years well the thing that i'd say is that just remember that one of the main functions of the riparian zone is sediment transport and if you make too many manders and you uh grade too much then you're going to cause deposition of that sediment and and so it's a it's a kind of a real design game to make sure that you have enough flow to push through the constant bed load so um it's it's something that you really need to think about and and uh talk to a good hydraulic engineer about yeah and you need to know your site so in this case the stream was in size 10 to 12 feet below the floodplain and so deposition is the name of the game it's what we're aiming for but of course every site is different so definitely referring to your experts and really knowing what your site needs those are both really important things if you want more information about this particular project you can go to okanagan highlands.org and there's contact info if you want to ask questions as well this conference will now be recorded okay all right sorry about that go ahead no problem okay so we're talking about considerations for bioengineering some of the context for when you choose to install these types of treatments and we're looking at how soil bio engineering treatments are often not a permanent fix so the the bottom left slide is a is a small stream in utah and they went through and did some uh bank shaping and they uh they did some planting as you can see on the left-hand side of the picture and then they put in the vein in the middle uh and what happened was if you look right on the right side of the vein you'll see a coir log that broke loose upstream floated down and jammed into the opening that was supposed to allow the water to go through and not push out against the bank and when it plugged it up it pushed it to the left and caused it to go right through through the willows and they weren't old enough to be able to protect it so um a permanent fix is is often uh you know a dream in some cases on the right side they uh this is one that was in uh it was north dakota and uh they did a huge uh treatment there and that bank was uh extended out into the water oh another 15 feet and uh and then that's for your fabric that's hanging down in there there is a whole bunch of planting but it's all underwater so they didn't calculate the amount of water going down it eroded underneath and the entire project was lost so sometimes a permanent fix is is not in the cards yeah so there are a lot of variables and we have to be able to accept a certain level of risk if we're going to use bioengineering even though we often don't create a permanent fix the intent is with bioengineering to support and restore those natural processes so that restoration can continue over time and so that's what we're looking at here yeah and so the you know the the top left slot slide is a before picture and this is a very small stream in northern nevada and uh what we're what we're looking for is to be able to get um some riparian vegetation re-established it had been gone for a number of years this had been grazed very heavily over in the past and uh so we went in and did a lot of planting and we did a lot of adjustments and what you see in the right-hand side is the results over about a few years a lot of years um the willows uh established well and in addition to that this edges really started growing in and uh on the floodplain that didn't have any vegetation at all as you can see in the upper left nice so we also have to consider that the growth and development of the whole riparian buffer is crucial that's going back to chris's earlier comment and that this requires maintenance to accomplish so uh you know an operation and maintenance plan is is pretty important especially if you're installing any kind of bioengineering structure the slide on the lower left is uh happens to be in california and what we have there is a is a brush revetment made out of old christmas trees and remember in california it doesn't have a lot of water in a lot of its streams for most of the year the only time they get water is during runoff periods and the water there broke loose one of the christmas trees where the arrow is and that has started to uh break up the whole line and if you went in right now and pulled that back in and wired it up and and uh uh protected it then uh you wouldn't lose the whole thing this has the potential being of losing the entire line of trees notice too the tall white things are actually tree guards and they planted a whole bunch of trees and shrubs all along the back of the red batman and then you can also see that black line is actually drip irrigation line again because there is much water there during most of the year so a little bit of maintenance and you can see that one of the several of the tree guards are laying down and having those somebody go back in and lift those back up make sure the trees are all right would help now rather than later yeah and the same is true with beaver dam analogs they do requirement and says well depending on your goals and objectives and what kind of flows you get but here you're looking at a couple of people going in and installing additional weave material on an existing beaver dam analog oja had also put in new posts there as well as another form of maintenance so you can get a lot more out of your structures if you're able to go back and plan ahead to have enough funding to maintain them so these bioengineering treatments rely on deposition of sediment trees shrubs and plants with hair-like root systems as the basis of strength development of larger root growth and sometimes also inert material it's pretty important that uh as as you get the plants established uh the above ground biomass is as important as the root mass and because the bio the above ground biomass the leaves and stems are what reduces the energy of the water as it flows through and as they move sometimes what you'll find is is the uh limbs will lay down on the ground the water will flow over the top of it and it'll provide additional protection and that's why you want to make sure that you plant the right plants that have flexible stems on the lower part and as you go up the channel you're going to go with bigger and bigger plants so it's important to sort of plan out what you're going to do and where most of the velocities are going to hit so if a moderate storm occurs before your vegetation is established you can expect that the bioengineering structures may not be firmly enough anchored to stay put you may have high potential for significant additional bank erosion so you'll just want to look at that during the planning process and make sure that either you're okay with that risk or you can take steps to mitigate for it and the other part of that is making sure that the bio-engineering structures that you install are soundly designed and that you have the right amount of uh the structure in the bank as protection you also have um the plants in the right places to help with holding the uh the whole bank together as everything gets established right and also unanticipated changes can result in unexpected success so here you're looking at a beaver dam analog that was intended to be channel spanning it went across the whole channel in the beginning the water originally flowed straight through this area but when we unexpectedly had the bda flank the stream went around it we ended up developing so much more sinuosity and channel length that contributed to stability in the channel and then the whole bda became vegetated and it was a better outcome than we had even planned or hoped for so i think you know just a reminder to be open to unexpected failures that can result in success just a couple of things to point out and to remember is that you don't want to get too much additional length because that will affect the way the stream flows and the erosion potential so as you look at this and as you plan then maybe it's time to really start filling in around the outsides with uh with more trees and shrubs to increase that riparian zone yeah every situation is different but in every situation an interdisciplinary team approach is recommended and so you know you can get additional information from engineers hydrologists soil scientists biologists plant people and other professionals just makes more sense to work together one of the one of the additional people that i always like to have on the team that i consider the main person on the team is the landowner uh the landowner can make things happen that nobody else can they have a lot invested in the project they will make sure that uh things happen that that you know maybe we didn't uh budget for or something like that so making sure the landowners in there and they talk to these professionals will help everything go smoothly [Music] for sure and of course you always want to obtain all required permits before beginning construction it could be army corps or your state permits um permits are not always required for planting but it can at least be helpful to notify the agencies and the neighbors before you start this is one that i really firmly believe in and and what you'll find is that regulators hate to be blindsided and if you're out working in the stream and some somebody that is driving down the road they look over and see you're in the middle of the stream working they're gonna say oh my goodness they're they're screwing up the stream and then they call the regulator and said why are they doing this if they know that you're working in there they can defuse the situation very rapidly but if they get blindsided by somebody like that then things don't usually go well so it's always better just to keep them informed as to what you want to do and where you're going to do it and when you're going to do it for sure so switching gears a little bit we know that a lot of participants in this webinar are restoration practitioners and you come to this place already with a deep appreciation for riparian zones um just in case we have some folks who are newer to the work we want to just take a few minutes to go over some and and just to help us all together you know appreciate what are the functions of riparian zones and how do we know when we're looking at them so riparian zones are the areas between the aquatic and upland habitats and they're typically long linear areas along rivers and streams that are occasionally flooded by those bodies of water and remember that the long linear um stream systems are are very common in the west as you move further east uh those long linear lines sort of get blurred in with the vegetation and it's not as easy to tell that they're there but uh it's it's important to understand that that the right parent zones are between the water and the uplands and and uh when you're planting you want to make sure that you understand that water is the controlling factor for a lot of the plants definitely so our riparian zones may be dry for portions of the growing season so depending on the time of year when you're looking you may have to look for more clues to identify their locations they have saturated soil conditions and they have vegetation that requires free and unbound water or conditions more moist than normal being able to look at these things and remember them will help you to decide where the riparian zone is and where you should be working it's not always easy to tell and sometimes in very disturbed conditions it's very difficult to tell so trying to keep some sort of order in your thought process and your planning will help you come out with a better plan so riparian zones comprise only a small proportion of the total landscape in the west they're only about one percent and they've only been recognized as fully functioning dynamic ecosystems in the last two or three decades it's really surprising how small a proportion of the total landscape riparian zones are and we sometimes forget about how big they were in the past and then in terms of recognizing them as as functioning ecosystems it's surprising how it really wasn't recognized that they were part of an ecosystem and that's why you know the dams were so destructive uh people didn't understand what the dams did so uh you know understanding what an ecosystem what the riparian ecosystem is will help you make a lot better plan and a lot better recovery for it okay we're going to move pretty quickly to the next few slides so we have time for our teaser but just defining riparian zones where water saturates the soil more than in adjacent areas and water loving vegetation is concentrated it comes down to what are the three most important things to get plants to grow in the west water water and water all right so some functions just very quickly you know they provide erosion control by regulating sediment transport and distribution they enhance water quality and produce organic matter for aquatic habitats here we're looking at some folks appreciating a riparian zone in the okanagan highlands on an ohio field trip they also provide a lot of wild life habitat so we were looking for dragonflies in that picture go ahead so okay so looking at riparian zone functions they're indicators of environmental change they're sensitive to variations in the environment and the hydrologic cycle and they're among the most diverse dynamic complex biological systems on earth so the little uh picture that you see in the upper right is a canary in a bird cage and when we talk about indicators of environmental change uh the riparian zones are sort of the canaries in the coal mines and the coal miners used to use canaries to when they went down into the coal mine they would look at the canaries and make sure that they were still alive if the canary started uh keeling over in the cage they knew they had a very short time before oxygen was gone so it was a very good way to tell that things were happening and bad things were happening so same thing with riparian zones they help us understand the way environmental changes build all right okay so now it's time to get into the zone so when we're looking at riparian zones they're actually made up of five different component zones within the riparian zone so different considerations go along with each of these zones and different treatments are appropriate so that's what we're going to dig into now so here uh we'll start with the first zone and so this is what we call the tow zone and it's the elevation between the bed the stream bed itself and the average water elevation this is really the zone of highest stress this is the one that if you don't protect it will wipe out everything else you do above it um it's often undercut by currents uh you know below the average water elevation uh as it erodes into the bank uh suddenly you know it'll result in bank failure above uh oftentimes it's inundated for more than six months out of the year and that six month period means that it's very difficult to get woody vegetation installed there because it can't handle that much water so this is something where a lot of times we'll use inert material or we'll use wetland plants like bulrush to help protect the bank the next zone is called the bank zone and you'll hear different names for these zones sometimes this is called the splash zone but it's basically the same thing this is the portion of the bank between the average water elevation and the bank full discharge elevation and it's exposed to the erosive river currents wind generated wave wash ice and debris wet dry cycles uh freezing and thawing those can be really damaging to when you're trying to get vegetation to grow in in a bank that's exposed to those it's inundated for less than six months out of the year which means that you can start planting woody vegetation there normally we're going to plant shrubby willows that have very flexible stems so when the water hits it they just lay down when the water goes over they come right back up again and then you're not going to plant large shrubs or trees in this zone i've seen many a planting plan where they have i've even seen planting plants where they have cottonwoods planted there that's probably the worst thing that you can plant there flexible stems overbank zone or the floodplain this is the bank between bankful discharge and the overbank elevation uh occasionally it's exposed to uh river currents you know when you get an outbank event uh you have a lot of debris and ice damage here uh where the ice or debris is carried down the river and it's deposited on this zone you have freeze thaw cycles sometimes you'll get wind generated waves that will do some erosion especially during spring runoff plants in this zone should be when you're planting you want to make sure that you select plants that are inundation tolerant again you want flexible stems shrubby willows dogwoods and others are usually found here you want to be careful with older birch and some larger species again because the bigger branches don't bend and if the water hits it you get enough pressure lost enough velocity you can rip the plants out the transitional zone this is just what it says we're transitioning from water to dry and so this is the area between the overbank zone and the flood prone elevation this uh zone is where the riparian plant species transition uh usually it's not subjected to uh you know a lot of erosive water currents except they're in high water sometimes you'll get overland flow problems that kind of thing or wind this this is where you would start planting your trees normally on the upper uh part of that particular bank plant species here you can plant a stream inundation tolerant or flood tolerant species and then the last zone is the upland zone uh this is the zone that's above the flood prone zone uh erosion here is more overland you have overland water where it's coming off the fields or uh rangeland or whatever it is uh above and it's and flows over this and into into the stream eventually wind erosion is another problem and then the big one is elimination of the riparian buffers through uh inappropriate farming practices over grazing timber harvest development all those sorts of things will damage the riparian zone drought tolerance is probably more important than anything else when you're selecting species to be planted in this zone all right so that's a look at the component zones now let's look at just the principles of bioengineering so here's a definition from 1997 why such an early days definition well because alan and leech are to bioengineering as hitchcock has been to plant id and if you're not sure who i mean by hitchcock that could be some good homework for you so streambank soil bioengineering is defined as the use of live and dead plant materials in combination with natural and synthetic support materials for slope stabilization erosion reduction and vegetative establishment and this is just where we make use of everything we can find and the dead plant materials work really well like logs that we can use in some of the structures and plant behind those and as the log uh starts to rot and and finally breaks down and goes away the plants are old enough to be able to handle the stream itself and this can be also with the natural or synthetic material so roots only go some deep so deep some situations biological and inert solution and here uh what we're what we're just trying to say is that that the root systems on these plants on riparian plants can go a long ways down and they can do some pretty good um structural uh integrity with the provide good structural integrity for the soil but in some cases and then the dotted line shows a slope failure and the blue arrow is water coming in and when water hits that slope failure area it can actually drop off the whole the whole treatment so by adding inert material it gives us a little bit more structure that the roots won't be able to provide so we're using plants as the main structural components to stabilize and reduce erosion on stream eggs rather than just for aesthetics we're looking for a successful establishment of those plants both herbaceous and woody it's very important just remember if the plants don't grow then it's going to be awfully hard for them to help protect the bank okay so let's take a quick look at some advantages and disadvantages uh stream bank soil bioengineering it can have higher aesthetic quality than traditional bank protection with just rock can be easier to transition to an end you can have some habitat value as well so aquatic and terrestrial wildlife can be very cost effective can be self-healing and sustainable can improve itself over time you can use indigenous natural materials can also involve landowners and volunteers and really that's one of the most beautiful parts is when you can have your community be an important part of installing the treatment they really feel like you know there's some ownership there and you can also minimize site disturbance so there's a lot of advantages to going with bioengineering yeah and it's uh it's one of those things where it's it's fairly it's reasonably priced when we start adding in uh something like rock or something that takes a lot of money just to design it let alone to be able to get all the equipment and all the rock so this was a way to be able to use the natural material that's around and make those into structures that can withstand the force of the river velocities and and provide potential protection some disadvantages like we talked about there can be failure to grow they may be uprooted by freezing and thawing it could be damaged by ice and debris wildlife wildlife and livestock can come and just feed on it and eat it up there is maintenance required and there can be other issues the big thing here is just to remember that those things can happen and make sure in your planning process that you uh think about that and think about is this a river that has a lot of ice that flows down or a lot of debris and then plan accordingly right okay so now what we want to do is give you a teaser of what some of these treatments look like so that you can be thinking about what treatments you want to know more about to learn how to install them yourself so um basically go ahead chris well um i was just going to say in so we'll go through the same zones that i talked about earlier and so the the graphic on the right is just the same one that you saw before just to help you identify the toe zone uh some of the treatments that we use in the toe zone are fascines or uh cigars of willows courier logs root wads brush revetment and live beaver dam analogs again you want to make sure that you're using the right species for this because it's the ozone and because there's a lot of water some of the plantings are going to be very difficult with most of these treatments you do have um uh wood that eve if the plants don't grow don't grow sorry and if the plants don't grow then what you'll find is that the wood is still there to provide protection or the courier coir is actually coconut fiber it has a very high tensile strength uh root wads are at what it says just roots uh brush revetments are like christmas tree revetments i talked about before and then the live beaver dam analogs right and then as you move into the bank zone uh you have some different options for treatments like brush mattresses vertical bundles pole planting vegetative geo grids retrofitting established rock roof wrap or installing new rock rip rap with vegetation being installed at the same time what you'll find is that in many cases especially if you start getting near development areas or where people are building closer than they should to the river uh somebody has a you know a five million dollar house on the edge of the river and the the stream is starting to erode towards the house they aren't going to be very happy if you go in and plant the willow so rock is very comforting and what we've done is pioneered a bunch of ways that we can use vegetation with the rock rip rap and eventually over time what you'll find is the rock disappears and the vegetation grows throughout it nice and then as you get up into the overbank zone you can look at options like clump plantings erosion control fabric a brush trench and containerized plants you'll notice here that these are probably a little the clumps are are pretty big that's we're actually going out harvesting a whole clump of plant like a willow where we're digging up roots and everything and we're just transplanting that to a new spot erosion control fabric you saw that in one of the previous slides that's again the coir fabric which is the coconut fiber it's oftentimes required by the permitting agencies and there's a there are ways in which you can plant under it and through it which and they and it still provides that protection before the plants are able to provide its own protection then containerized plants are a way to provide a lot of diversity to the planting itself okay so now we're going to breeze through some examples you can be thinking about what you'd like to learn more about so this one is is again this is trout creek in northern nevada very small stream uh it was grazed very heavily and we had this huge uh cut on the bank and what we were trying to do is stabilize it before it went into a road that was on the right side of the or the left side of the the uh slide so the next thing we did is we came in and designed a brush mattress for it next one julie yep and this is what happened after we installed it this is the the growth on the brush mattress next one this is the design that we came up with this is just a way to um show people how to build it and we tried to put in some of the most uh important factors of it what you'll find with bioengineering treatments is there's a lot of art to it and there are very few people that will install it exactly the same way as somebody else but as long as you're using the right principles it can be very successful and the next one this is a again on trout creek this is actually building that brush mattress where we did just a little bit of shaping so there wasn't an overhang on top of the bank then we're putting the willows in standing upright against the bank we want to make that thick enough so we can't see the bank through the wheels so as you can see there's a lot of guys in there working and planting and then that big round thing at the bottom is called a facine and we'll talk about that here in a second this is a way to build a facine and install it we have uh in one of the manuals i have the there's there are instructions on how to build it using these uh pictures as a way to show you how to do it next one and then what you see here is the scene is just sitting there waiting it isn't actually installed yet it was a lot easier to put it down before you have the standing willows there so you can get it over the top of them so it's just sitting outside and if you look at the states at the base of where the guys are standing those are the stakes that are going to hold it uh from going downstream so the scene would go over the top of that and then a series of stakes would go in between it to hold it there then the next thing is the vertical bundle the two most uh common points of failure on any bioengineering treatment is the upstream end and the downstream end so we have to do actual extra protection there to make sure that they don't break down there or erode and so this is a vertical bundle which is a bundle of willows you can see it there it's been installed with the butts down and then uh the spout stakes to hold it there and then that will grow as the next slide shows it's these are a couple of those in the same place the two-year-old willow is is a different species than the one on the right but they were installed in the same all place nice job chris with going so quickly through those we wanted to leave some time for questions so this comic says it's time we face reality my friends we're not exactly a rocket scientist the nice thing is you don't have to be a rocket scientist to do bio engineering that's right and and the the other point i'd like to point out is that there are no cookbooks here you can't just go to page 12 and say oh this is what i need you have to look at the stream you have to understand what kind of flows you have what kind of flooding you have you know what are the soils what kind of species you have around there where can you get the plants that you want to plant so in rocket science again everybody it's a it's an artistic thing and as you put in you'll learn a way that you like to do it and then hopefully going back and looking at monitoring and maintenance you can determine how well your system went and you want to do that early enough that you can go in and add more or fix it great so i think we're ready to take questions great thank you chris and julie um if anyone has questions please enter them into the chat box and we'll try to get to those the first question we did have is it was mentioned that the riparian zones are now only one percent of the lands uh do we have statistics on how much has been lost yes there are there there are statistics on that and uh the i i don't i can't tell you right off the top of my head where those are uh but i think well there are several and and if you want more of that uh you can email me and i can uh send that to you but uh there have been really a concentrated effort to try and find out how much loss there is and um whether we're gaining or losing and and where that's most common hi this is landon uh i'm going to be helping heather with the questions uh julie and chris thank you again so much for presenting great job the second question is appreciating that riparian systems and rivers are dynamic what considerations should we have balancing planting or bank engineering and accepting that the channel may migrate throughout the floodplain that is a really tricky balance to find and every project is different we found at the triple creek site that it really helped to concentrate our planting effort on the inside of the meanders where we knew that the stream was most likely to change on the outside of the meander and so our plantings were more stable in those places and it is really hard to do you know to make big changes to the channel platform while concurrently installing plants but yet you want to get your plants in the ground because it takes time to for them to grow so that was one of our best compromises was to really identify the inside of the meanders where we could concentrate the plantings to keep them safe while the channel was really actively changing and then to continue to plant every year depending on the results of each flow or high flow event and sometimes uh you know if you do plan on the inside of the meander uh you are sort of moving the water to more of the outside of the mander so in when you do that then what i like to do is plant uh more of the zone if i can plant more the transition or upland zone then that gives me more plants that will grow as the stream continues to adjust [Music] it's an excellent question really good great thank you the next question is regarding the commonly referenced riparian zone uh image that you used and just the wide diversity uh wide variations of conditions that we see out in eastern washington and how project managers take into account sort of the different geological and soil conditions aspect rainfall that could eliminate or limit some of those zones in different places um how does how does um project managers kind of account for those variations yeah and then one thing if any of you have taken one of my classes you'll know that i spend quite a bit of time on zones the thing about zones is that you will not find all the zones all the time uh sometimes the zones may be six inches wide sometimes they may be 30 feet wide and uh so what we were trying to do is is be able to give you an idea of what a zone is technically and then when you're out looking at the stream that you want to work on then trying to figure out okay i have i don't really have a bank zone here but i have a flood plain uh you know i have a tow zone and and and then designing your treatments based on what zones are there and trying to develop maybe a bigger part of the zone or bring it back his own in and understanding that not all zones not all streams will have all the zones i'm not sure i'd answer any question completely but you know another another thing that can be really helpful is you know if you don't know what the future conditions are going to be and you do know that it's going to be a dynamic system that changes in uncertain ways is to just not have all your eggs in one basket so you can take a an area and plant species that are drought tolerant and species that are flood tolerant and plant them more closely than you want them to be in the future because half of them may die but that way you have some species present that will be appropriate for future conditions regardless of which way it goes and so that's also another technique for being you know concurrently planting while the conditions are changing yep i've done that too yeah absolutely uh this next question is regarding uh what types of plants and how to go about planting in the tow zone and it's specifically asking about planting bulrush or other suitable plants and what your recommendations would be whoa um uh again i spend almost a day on that uh you know in a training session so um i'm not gonna be able to answer it very easily uh the control zone again is is it's one of the hardest zones to work on because there's so much stress on it and so it's important that you uh understand that that it's going to take a lot to be able to plant that and most often you're going to need some sort of structure not just a planting and uh thinking about what kind of structure will go there is is really there's a lot of homework and going to uh a streamed gage site and looking at regional curves to find out how much flow what kind of water is going down there after um you know the spring runoff uh what kind of soils do you have um there's a whole list of things that you need to sort of concentrate on uh i've got a paper that i've got several papers that talk about that that would give you a little bit more idea on how to develop a plan with that again the planting the bulrush one thing about them is they have a huge root system great big rhizomatous root system and we just dig them up in one foot clumps that are about six to eight inches deep and just transplant them right over into the stream uh either above or below the structure that we put in usually above it and uh and just slap it in and it's amazing how well they do and a couple things i would add is if you create the conditions that are conducive to those species oftentimes they will return because they're in the sea bank they're just waiting for the right conditions um and then also i just added a question to our survey i would like to learn more about blank and so these kinds of topics that you really could spend a whole session on go ahead and put them in there because we could consider those topics for future webinars too yeah good point um i have a question for you uh so we're seeing bdas and pals and similar type structures being more and more incorporated into projects what should project managers be thinking about for long-term conditions of the sites what happens to those bdas and pals if they're not maintained or if beaver are not an option are there still ways for those kind of projects to succeed well those are you know there's a lot of questions there and a lot of content we could discuss we haven't been installing some of these treatments for long enough to have a lot of data on how they do long term but because we're oftentimes increasing the heterogeneity of the channel increasing the amount of structure and surface area in the channel we're seeing that natural processes are being jump started and so there are situations where even if you can't continue to maintain in perpetuity that you can reach a tipping point where you then start to see deposition in the places where you were hoping to see and changes that lead to stability in the system um moving toward equilibrium you know whether you've decreased the slope enough increased the length enough that now you're you're healing an incise channel or what have you um i think you know the key for project managers is to look for that tipping point so you know kind of when it's okay to walk away um if you're not able to bring beaver in relocate them provide the food that they need so one thing i'd say too uh just emphasize what julie said is that there's not a lot of long-term data on on those and so knowing what they'll do in the in the long term is is a real question mark so but you have to if you follow the guidelines like julie's talking about at least you'll be uh prepared for some of the things that might happen great thank you and there's just another question related to beaver dam analogs that someone had do you advocate digging into the bank to counter-sink a beaver dam analog um i wouldn't call it digging uh depending on what your method of installation is i think the less disturbance the better but the way that we installed ours was postponing with a hydraulic or a pneumatic post pounder and we definitely pounded into the bank zone um farther than you think you might need because you're anticipating that some of these structures are going to flank and if you have those posts already installed and you make sure that they're driven to sufficient depth that they will still be stable even if the bank disappears so you're driving them like 80 90 percent in the ground um then if you do have an end run you can go ahead and weave those posts they're already there you can also see a certain amount of interaction between the stream and instruction even structure even if they're not woven so i definitely advocate for installing them um out you know into the bank zone the overbank zone i just wouldn't characterize it as digging because that sounds like more disturbance than you would want yeah i'd agree with that for sure and i think that if you use and a lot of times you can use the same principles that we use for whole plantings where you're driving those in as live plants and and allow them to grow so uh and it depends on how much of course how much banging you're doing and and but uh if you do some splitting and that sort of thing on uh if it splits uh you can also cut it off a little bit so there are several things you can do to help with that and that's the interface of bioengineering and your classic bda where you could actually consider pounding in a lot live plant materials rather than only inner wood materials do you speak to the limitations of various bioengineering techniques related to flow velocity or stream gradient there there are there's a there's a lot of of research that is going on and has gone on at universities and in government labs uh private uh industry has done a lot of research on that trying to establish you know what what kind of limitations there are uh how much they can handle uh a lot of turn in terms of um you know how much uh sheer it can handle how much uh the you know what what kind of flooding uh and and so i can give you those because it's i mean it's pretty technical and there are lots of of new papers coming out pretty constantly with research on those so i encourage you to look in the literature for that kind of information great that's all the questions we have for now um does anyone have any last questions before we uh end our presentation today i've got one heather okay so i'm just wondering especially considering how dry and arid our climate is and that we it's very difficult to put smaller plants into a lot of these riparian areas and expect very high survival so what kind of emphasis do you like to put into the maintenance of these sites and as in terms of irrigation and i think to me that the irrigation is one of those things that you have to sort of add up in your planning process to decide if you have the money for something like that and sometimes what i'll do is is plant plants that are bigger that i can get going and then that creates a better environment for smaller plants and then come back in a phase two planting where i add that diversity and some of the smaller containerized plants so it's a you know it's definitely one of those things where it's budget driven number one and number two is is is there a source for the water remember removing water to irrigate plants uh you got to have uh in in idaho you have to have water rights and so it's a it's one of those things that it becomes a legal problem in terms of using water if you're going to plant out so so there are a lot of considerations that would go into determining whether you can irrigate and sometimes i just like to sort of build up and and get more organic matter and and bigger trees that provide shade and and uh that kind of thing and then and then plant in phase two and phase three and phase four um something i would love to add to that i think oftentimes when we're looking at our budgets it's easy to feel like we can't afford to irrigate so i just really would like to encourage practitioners and project managers to think about irrigation during the grant writing phase because there is no reason you know unless the grant won't allow it to plan for that from day one once it's in there as a line item you have it and it's like it's such a good feeling to know you have the resources that are needed to care for those plants and honestly i think it's better to plant half as many or a quarter the number of what you're hoping for and take really good care of them and have them do really well and plan for that i'd echo that yeah in washington state we have irrigation rights uh water rights required for irrigating plants as well so definitely an important consideration making sure that you have access to water before starting a project and every state is a little bit different yeah you know it's every state is and uh utah it's verboten you can't even use tail water so it's uh just depends on where you're at you can also look at planting pole plantings where you're augering a hole down into the capillary fringe of the water table and you're giving your plant access to water naturally from day one great well let's wrap up there uh this is uh of course one of a four-part series julie did you want to speak to um the next series and steps for that sure yeah so um we'll be putting out a survey right after this uh webinar today and so we're gonna shape our content going forward based on the feedback that we get from you so um we're looking at you know focusing in on just a few of those treatments so that we can dig in more to the details i know today we covered a lot of different topics and we really scratched the surface just a little bit and as practitioners sometimes what you really want is like give me the details i want to install one of these um so just please do fill out that survey because it will inform our webinars going forward we're going to be doing three more webinars on the topic of bioengineering as part of this series and thank you so much for coming we sure appreciate it and we enjoyed very much being able to talk to you and hopefully we gave you some information that you can use yes thank you very much chris and julie and um this video will be available on youtube thanks to trisha for organizing and thanks everyone for attending hey feel free to contact us at these email addresses if you have questions see y'all