Wetlands Video

[Mike Clifford]

Very cool video that explains much of what is taking place among our watersheds.

From "The Wetlands Initiative".

 

[Guest rich mc]

tim smith and i were at a meeting in Dekalb about the wetland initiative.its more complex than the video lets out. it started out sounding fine but derailed when they mentioned daming the kish to create wetlands. i am for creating wetlands that would drain into the kish but not daming the river .

[Mike Clifford]

tim smith and i were at a meeting in Dekalb about the wetland initiative.its more complex than the video lets out. it started out sounding fine but derailed when they mentioned daming the kish to create wetlands. i am for creating wetlands that would drain into the kish but not daming the river .

 

Langan Creek had modifications done in a similar fashion.

Not sure how it was accomplished or what ever came of it.

http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lon=-87.81...amp;datum=nad83

C2000 Grants in 1999-

Northern Illinois Anglers, $60,000. Backwater Lake Development on Langan Creek. A backwater lake will be developed to reduce flooding on Langan Creek. A levee on the creek will be breached and a concrete flow control structure will be installed to allow the backwater area to be flooded and drained seasonally. The lake will provide wetland and open water habitats for fish and wildlife.

 

Can't find anything on TWI's project you speak of Rich, but I found this interesting nugget:

A dam consists of a 3/8-inch cable stretched low across the streambed and anchored into the banks. The cable supports a 48-inch galvanized chain link fence fabric that catches debris traveling downstream. The trapped material creates a barrier to stream flow, causing water to back up until it overtops whatever has been trapped. As additional material is trapped in the dam face, sediment begins to deposit behind the dam due to reduced energy and increased residence time. As more fines are deposited, they assist in ‘sealing’ the dam. Eventually, the prism behind the dam will completely fill with sediment, serving to raise the stream bed, reverse channel incising, reduce stream velocity and energy, broaden the channel bed, and increase the fines content of the sediment.

 

I'd like to hear more about the importance of saving wetlands while creating barriers to fish and invertebrate movement.

We're essentially trying to do the work that beavers have already been doing for us through the annals of time.

Of course, their habitat has degraded to the point of extirpation of the species in many cases already.

 

A case study from the Chesapeake region may have a better model:

Background - When we imagine the eastern-American landscape of 200-300 years ago, most people picture a landscape of nearly continuous forests bisected by free flowing streams. The reality was very different. Before the fur trade decimated beaver populations in early colonial times, beavers were abundant on streams throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. After beavers were extirpated from the Chesapeake basin, many perennial streams gradually became intermittent or ephemeral - possibly due to lowering of water tables as beaver dams disappeared. Current research in the West affirms that the return of beavers can result in a return of perennial flows to headwater areas and a more natural stream flow regime. The public’s (often) negative perception of beavers precludes us from importing beavers to restore the lost hydrologic functions. However, researchers in the western US have developed low-cost methods to construct shallow beaver dam-like structures (BDS) to restore riparian areas and increase groundwater storage. By retaining eroded material behind the structure, the BDSs reduce downstream sedimentation and augment alluvial water storage capacity as they mature. Because they are modeled after small beaver dams, the structures represent an ecologically guided attempt to restore what was once a ubiquitous component of the ecosystem. http://www.cacaponinstitute.org/otwb.htm

[Guest rich mc]

having small wetlands added to the flood plain makes perfect sense.even some small creek tribs may work with small riffles to hold back water but allow passage of species during higher water.what was an idea for the kish was to build dams and regulate the pool elevation to take effluant from the water treatment plants . the wetland guy mentioned the chicago watewater plant as the first big plan to work on. he mentioned 2,000 acres to contain the water[ carbon and nitrate credits] rich