EMAIL TO A FRIEND PRINT ARTICLE

How to Save a Stream in Your Area

Jul 9, 2008

HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR STREAM? LOOK AT ITS BANKS

Just as your physician might take your temperature or your blood pressure to assess your health, you can tell a lot about a waterway's condition by looking at its banks.

Are they steep and eroded, or gentle and covered in grass and other plants? Is there raw dirt showing at bends in the river or creek? Is your stream digging its way down into a deep, straight trench or does it meander all over its valley? Have streamside landowners tried to stabilize the banks with large rocks or even old cars?

LOOKING BEYOND CLEAN-UP

Depending on your answer, you may have larger issues to tackle than simply cleaning up trash from your designated waterway. You may also have to address streamside farming practices, look at storm water runoff and even learn about how and where to plant willows, reeds and other bank-stabilizing vegetation. And in the process you might learn a central truth of moving water: Anything you do on one bank will almost certainly affect the opposite bank and everyone downstream.

Don't despair. Many stream-bank projects are fairly easy to accomplish, and they're central to Outdoor Life's Project Save-A-Stream, an initiative that aims to help volunteers clean up and improve neighborhood streams across the nation.

This spring has been a pointed reminder of the awesome power of moving water. Floods in the Midwest have swelled even backyard tributaries and amplified flows in the big rivers like the Mississippi, Des Moines and Missouri that have raged through the heart of America. It's hard to prepare for flood events such as those, but you can help protect the health of your tributaries when The Big One hits.

STABLE BANKS EQUAL HEALTHY STREAMS

Think of a healthy stream as a healthy artery, carrying water just as your internal plumbing carries blood. If a stream starts cutting into a bank, eating away at soil, the water becomes muddy and flows can become erratic, just as your own arteries can become clogged with plaque and precipitate heart trouble. Too much bank erosion and a stream can carve a new channel, displacing streamside landowners and amplifying floods when they hit.

The conventional response to this bank erosion has been to armor the streamside, typically by dumping rip-rap (large boulders) along the eroded face. That will work to protect the armored bank, but the currents that cut the bank will be deflected and start undercutting the opposite bank. At its worst, you'll often see a living stream so controlled by rip-rap that it becomes a contained channel, little more than a drainage ditch.

ORGANIZE A PLANTING PARTY

A more sustainable way to protect an eroded bank is to recognize the problem before it becomes severe, and try to stabilize it with vegetation. Willows are often good medicine because they are easy to plant, grow soil-holding roots quickly and are generally native to the stream. You might also think of planting a native ground cover or sedge (water-loving grass), but contact your local conservation district or department of natural resources to find sources for native vegetation and guidance about when and where to plant.

A willow-planting party is a good project for Save-A-Stream volunteers. Once you locate a source of trees, cut limbs at a 45-degree angle, let them sit in buckets of water for several days until the cut begins to soften and sprout roots, and then stab the cut end in the mud and exposed dirt of the eroded bank. Willows are fast to root and grow and in the right spots can be holding banks within a year or two.

Done right, a vegetated bank will hold even during floods. High water and strong current will wash right over the limber limbs of willows and the root balls of reeds, keeping the soil on the bank instead of washed downstream.

Comment on This Article Your Name: Enter the following word: Your Comments: Please keep comments focused on the subject (and profanity-free) or we may delete your post. Do not enter more than 10 lines. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us.

We require all participants in interactive areas to accept the terms of the Bonnier Corporation subscriber agreement. Please read the agreement before making comments. When you click on the button above to submit your comments, you are indicating your acceptance of and are agreeing to adhere to the terms of the subscriber agreement.