Presenter/s: William Brignon
Symposium Session: 2020 - 04 Observe Stage 0
Topics covered: adaptive management and monitoring, beavers, hydraulics, lessons learned, riparian, and stream
ABSTRACT
Stage 0 is the initial, pre-disturbance condition in the Stream Evolution Model described by Cluer and Thorne (2013). Recently, a group of US Forest Service restoration practitioners and their partners have been restoring depositional valley bottoms to Stage 0 to reverse the effects of historic land-use practices that degraded dynamic wetland-stream complexes (Powers et al. 2018) which support abundant native biota. Twenty-five of these process-based restoration projects have been implemented throughout Oregon. Several of them are comprehensive projects designed to completely reconnect depositional valley bottoms over extended areas, whereas others applied more traditional techniques to return smaller areas of the valley bottom to a pre-disturbance condition. Regardless of the methods and scale of these projects, the goal of restoring dynamic valley bottom processes is the same. In response to scientific, legal, and policy questions about these projects we gathered US Forest Service restoration practitioners and their colleagues for a series of workshops to specifically define this type of restoration and build influence diagrams of key ecological processes at play. This presentation will provide an overview of the workshop outcomes and share how they will be used to develop a programmatic monitoring plan for US Forest Service projects that aim to restore valley bottoms to Stage 0. There will be a complimentary poster presentation so RRNW attendees can delve deeper into the influence diagram and offer feedback about the definition, as well as the ecological parameters and their relationships.