![\"Despite](\"https:\/\/www.fondriest.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/BooneBodySmith.jpg\" "\\"Despite")
Despite date showing that temperature is an issue on Boone Creek, a restoration at Jimmy Smith Park removed stream-shading trees (Photo courtesy of Kristan Cockerill)<\/p><\/div>\n
Since the monitoring began, three restoration projects have been completed along the same stretch of stream.<\/p>\n
“This great dataset let us then go back and look at the history of these projects and say: Was the data used? Was it not used? What has been the result?” Cockerill said.<\/p>\n
The results aren’t encouraging. Despite monitoring data that showed temperature to be one of the most significant water quality issues, temperatures have actually increased on some segments since restoration. In one case, trees that provided cooling shade were cut down because they were non-native and aging. When projects called for revegetating the banks, they often turned to short species that don’t shade the creek.<\/p>\n
Each project included armoring or reshaping eroding banks, which was associated with a water quality goal of reducing sediment. Yet nothing in the pre-restoration data suggested that sediment was actually a problem in the stream. The bank reinforcements went in where the stream was beginning to cut under a road or a parking lot, so while the nominal goal was to protect water quality, the effective goal was to protect those urban structures.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.fondriest.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/BooneBodyVarsityGym.jpg\" "\\"A")
A restoration at the university’s Varsity Gym may be contributing to lower temperatures downstream (Photo courtesy of Kristan Cockerill)<\/p><\/div>\n
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with modifying a stream to prevent a parking lot from collapsing. But there is a problem with characterizing those modifications as an attempt to improve water quality when they do nothing to improve the ecological condition of the stream.<\/p>\n
“Erosion as a problem because it’s going to potentially destroy something in the built environment is one thing. Erosion problem as a water quality problem is something different,” Cockerill said. “I worry greatly that, because we have lots of projects like this around the country, we are creating a situation where these projects have been set up to fail because the rhetoric and what’s actually happening don’t align.”<\/p>\n
Part of the solution, Cockerill said, is for restoration planners to be honest about what’s happening and what’s likely to happen with a restoration project, and to be pragmatic about the limitations of small-scale, site-specific urban stream restorations. Those projects aren’t going to return a stream to some idyllic past condition that existed before significant portions of their watersheds were developed. Instead, managers can turn to large-scale planning measures that address both water quality and the stress a stream can place on urban infrastructure.<\/p>\n
“By knowing that that’s what we’re doing, then there are ways to think about the larger watershed,” she said. “There are ways to think about storm water runoff at a larger scale that may actually have a much greater impact, both on protecting the built environment and ecologically, than restoring that one little 70-meter segment of creek.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Restoration projects on Boone Creek gave the stream a facelift but fell short of real water quality improvements. A water policy analyst says its time to rethink urban stream restoration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":15761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-15756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rivers-streams","tag-featured"],"remote_post_permalink":false,"remote_post_featured_image":false,"yoast_head":"\n