ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION

Position: Summer Field Technician
Employer: Landbridge Ecological LLC
Location: St. Paul, MN
Dates: May 2020-August 2020

My best attempt of a before and after at a site I was able to revisit two years post-restoration!

I got interested in ecological restoration because of a catchphrase my river and floodplain hydraulics professor said almost daily: “All problems start on the watershed.” Meaning problems such as flooding, erosion, and too many nutrients in the water usually originate from land use issues. For example, fertilizer from lawns can get washed into nearby surface water bodies and feed excessive algae growth. Thus, protecting and restoring native land habitats effectively protects waterways.

The majority of work for this job involved:

Removing invasive plants through pulling, weed whacking, or spraying herbicide
Planting shrubs and trees
Seeding prairie grasses and flowers
Installing erosion control blanket

While less common, I also got to do a lot of badass stuff like operating a skidsteer, running a chainsaw, mowing down invasive shrubs with a brush saw, and throwing logs in a wood chipper. This job was also my intro to learning how to identify plants!

Even though all projects took place on a watershed, my favorite projects were definitely stream bank restorations. Working on stream restoration projects also led me to an interest in Low Tech Process Based Restoration (LT-PBR). I actually stumbled upon LT-PBR while looking for information on how engineers design stream restoration projects but instead found this excellent website put out by Utah State University that flips the idea of engineering a stream on its head. Their whole philosophy is instead of putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into engineering a new stream and bringing in heavy machinery to execute those plans, send a crew out with some shovels, a chainsaw, and a post pounder, mimic the beavers, then “let the water do the work”. (This research hole also got me hyped about beavers! I 10/10 recommend reading Eager by Ben Goldfarb if you’d like to learn more about the history and ecology of beavers!)

That said, there really is a time and place for both approaches to stream restoration. In some urban areas where there isn’t space for a river to be it’s chaotic self, stream restoration that involves designing a channel and bringing in the excavators can improve habitat without letting the river run wild.

Ecological restoration work is rad and I hope to someday be more involved with again, perhaps next time on the watershed management/planning side!

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