Stoney Creek Restoration

Hey folks,
The Stoney Creek Restoration project will be taking place Sept 2-5 up at the Glen Alton Property. It would be great to coordinate who could help and when so I can organize drivers and folks that can meet to help out. Please send me days and time allotments that you have available to work. Basically, it takes 45 minutes one way to get to Big Stoney. So to make your trip worthwhile I would say that you need at least a 4 hour period of time that you can devote to going up there. More time would be great. So please send me the days and time allotments that you have and I can organize who folks can ride with. Also, please tell me if you are able to drive or would be willing to drive. Here's some transportation options for you:
Joe Williams, the local coldwater fisheries biologist for VDGIF, will be leaving from his office on South Main at 7:30 to 8am Teusday to Friday. He will be staying up there until the afternoon (4:30pm), getting back by 5:30 to 6pm.
I will be taking a caravan up to Stony Ck. Wednesday (Sept 3rd) at 2:30 pm and staying until the evening and I will also plan to take a van up there on Thursday (Sept 4) at 9:30 am. Let me know if one of these options work for you.
If not, I will attempt to organize a ride up there.
Once again, here are the directions:
Take 460 West from Blacksburg past Pembroke. Take a right on Big Stoney Creek Rd. (635). If you cross the New River you have gone too far. You will stay on 635 for at least 10-15 minutes. You will pass Cherokee Flats parking lot on your left and you will pass Glen Alton Rd on your left. Not far after you pass Glen Alton Rd., you will see open fields on your left. This is the field section where the work will be conducted. Drive up the road until you can see machinery working on the stream. Park in one of the pulloffs on the road.

What I hope to learn from Stream Habitat Management

Dr. Orth,

I've recently become very interested in Streams, Fish and Aquatic life, in general. I teach science at the middle school level and wondered if the information in this class would be interesting to my students. Last school year, most of my students agreed to give me their email addresses so that I could keep them "up to date" on current science events over the school year and into the summer of 2008. When I got the idea to attend this class, I decided to take a poll among my students in the class of 2013. (Yes! That is their High School Graduation Year!) This "poll" addressed their knowledge of, and their interest in streams, fish and how to manage/reclaim and reconstruct riparian ecology. Their interest was much greater than I ever imagined.
I had thought that a few boys would be interested because of fishing, but to my great delight, those showing an interest were both male and female, with nearly equal numbers of each responding!!!
So, in the interest of "higher education" for middle school students, I am taking this class to give them, and myself a better understanding of what might be involved in stream habitat management. I plan to use this knowledge to construct a unit on Stream Habitat Management for the Middle School Level with a focus on careers involved.
My area of expertise is in Biology, not Ecology or Ichthyology. Therefore, I am surely at a disadvantage. However, I am looking forward to learning new information that I may use to enlighten my students, many who are interested in careers as wildlife biologists, ecological engineers, university professors or prize winning fishermen.

Bonneville Cutthroat making a comeback!

There is such pressure on flowing water resources to meet the growing demands of our human economy that we sometimes think that the pressures are too much and the outlook is bleak. And working on raising awareness about native fishes is a greater challenge than birds that migrate and visit your feeders and capture your imagination about the mysteries of migration.

However, this recent news story about the Bonneville Cutthroat recovery is a great example of what it takes for restoration to be successful. Time is the number one factor and eternal vigilance and hope is another. We will be discussing the concept of time throughout this course and this news story about the Bonneville cutthroat covers about 34 years since Don Duff discovered a pure Bonneville cutthroat, thought to be extinct since the 1950s. 34 years is an example of 'career time' and for many tough managment problems "It takes a career"

A longer time frame is needed to understand the evolutionary history of the Bonneville cutthroat and its dynamic native habitats of the Bonneville basin. Explaining the patterns of freshwater fish distributions in North America requires an understanding of events of the Pleistocene, a period that began approximately 2-3 million years ago and lasted until approximately 10,000 years ago. Before this period an ancestral salmonid Eosalmo driftwoodensis was living and swimming the coastal regions of remnants of the supercontinent Laurasia. It is thought that about 2 million years ago a common trout ancestor separated into two evolutionary lines, one being the cutthroat and the other the rainbow trout and its related species. It wasn't until the emergence of the Rocky mountains and effects of glaciation during the Pleistocene ice ages that the streams and rivers were accessible and suitable for the anscestors of the Cutthroat trout to colonize. The erosion of these new mountains over thousands of years and stream captures or headwater transfers allowed the ancestral trouts to spread. The Cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki) persisted and evolved in a number of basins including the Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville diminished and its vestiges Great Salt Lake is devoid of fishes leaving the Bonneville cutthroat trout to perist in isolated drainages and Bear Lake. So the Bonneville cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki utah) is evolutionarily significant as it diverged from other cutthroat trout for perhaps 1 million years. This unique sub species has adapted to range of climatic variability of this region as was present as stream channels evolved during the Pleistocene period. Without the re-discovery of the pure Bonneville cutthroat by Don Duff in 1974, the restoration would not be possible. It is also the state fish of Utah.

In his essay Round River, Aldo Leopold wrote " If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." Through the decades since the Endangered Species Act was past, many have argued over the designation of the Bonneville cutthroat as a protected sub species. Efforts to protect and restore have been successful and give us all reason to be optimistic.

How things change in Pennsylvania

Yesterday I was feeling quite pleased with myself for having posted my schedule of lessons for Stream Habitat Management and completed my compilation of book references and journal articles for the semester. I thought I could return to the task of completing a review of a book manuscript on case studies in instream flow. Whenever you think you are caught up you will be surprised -- and perhaps 'surprise' is a great gift.

I received an email criticizing me for giving opinions unsubstantiated by scientific evidence, based on a recent quote in a newspaper. Then two items arrived in the mail... The June issue of the North American Journal of Fisheries Management contains a special section on Stream Restoration with 8 articles. The first article had located 345 studies on the effectiveness of stream rehabilitation, yet firm conclusions were difficult to make! We have a long way to go in the habitat management field. Then I opened the box from Amazon and reviewed "River Futures. An Integrative Scientific Approach to River Repair" which offers a comprehensive overview of our knowledge about river rehabiliation. This book contains more findings about this emergence of integrative river science but was not as comprehensive as I had hoped for -- so it is not a candidate for textbook adoption. It does contain a number of principles and common ground for productive collaborations among scientists and managers.

I have witnessed a welcome change in our society's focus on stream 'repair' since I first walked on a college campus decades ago. It is fitting to see the establishment of a Habitat Division in Pennsylvania as more and more agencies, non-profits, and for-profit enterprises advertise for and hire Stream Habitat Specialists. Rivers and streams remain some of our most altered ecosystems; yet progress is being made. Most importantly there is a surprising amount of crossdisciplinary agreement among geomorphologists, hydrologists, and ecologists in understanding how rivers function -- at least in general. When it comes to specifics there is more to disagree about, yet we recognize the absence of scientific knowledge, mismatches of time or spatial scales, or lack of specific data. And we are getting better at recognizing the solvable problems and avoiding the "train wrecks. "

Let me applaud you for enrolling and wanting to learn about successful management of stream habitats. It is a complex endeavor that requires "knowing and caring about the uses and values that people have in mind for the resource, such as angling, commercial fisheries, species protection, and aesthetics. It requires knowing when not to manage- to leave streams as they are. Increased abundance of fish, better fishing and ecosystem health are basic objectives. The modern trend is toward more professional management, toward more attention to the design and planning, and toward managing in ways that derive from and are increasingly attuned to natural processes in streams, the processes to which the fishes are adapted. This trend- in contrast to the artificiality and concern for tidiness that characterized some past work -- involves increased focus on the drainage basin; on riparian grazing and logging practices; on the roles of streambank vegetation, woody debris, and beaver; and on structural complexity within the channel."(Orth and White 1993 Stream Habitat Management, Chap. 9 Inland Fisheries Management in North America)

Welcome

If you are viewing this blog then you are most likely a student newly enrolled in my class, Stream Habitat Management. This blog is a place for all students to come together and share their perspectives on stream habitat issues. Every day many news stories on the plight of our rivers and streams and the conflicts that arise as humans use the flowing water resources, often with little understanding of the complexity that surrounds these habitats.

Some days I may just post a photograph that is meaningful to the topics we are exploring. This photo depicts critical habitat for the federally endangered Roanoke Logperch Percina rex.

I will post questions and issues to you via the blog and expect that you will respond to these questions based on your reading the assignments and integrating this information in your existing frameworks for understanding the world. At other times I will point you to interesting stories about rivers and streams, such as this one on dam removal in Pennsylvania http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08230/904653-358.stm . We can learn from one another as we share our unique perspectives and entertain the notion that we just might be wrong once in a while.

On the blog you can Comment on any posting. Additionally you are each authors for the blog so you can also post your own topics. I believe that we learn best by way of telling stories and writing stories in a language that makes most sense to us. No one wants to learn by simply following a new recipe. Do you?

So the first step is to select a place to tell your story -- a stream or a river that is close enough to visit a few times this semester. What are you looking for? Not too big... not too small ...not too familiar... not too far away. This sketch was drawn in fall 1997 in preparation of some stream bank stabilization in the North Fork Roanoke River. My students did a habitat and biotic assessment in 1998 setting us up for the question of what are things like now??

If you are reading this blog then you must be interested in becoming a better steward of our lands and flowing waters, developing your expertise in some specialty of stream habitat management, and willing and able to work with other students to solve stream management problems collaboratively. It will help if we know each other better.

So take a few minute and comment in response to this blog posting. Tell us who you are and what you hope to learn in Stream Habitat Management.