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Riparian Habitat Projects

Water is scarce in the west and riparian habitat in the Open Space is limited, consisting of old farm ponds, a few natural springs, and creek beds that are wet only when it rains. Many of the farm ponds dry up towards the end of the summer, especially in years when the rains have been light, making it even more difficult for wildlife to find a place to get a drink. However, all four Open Spaces have some riparian habitat.

A healthy riparian habitat has other benefits in addition to water. First is shade and the cooler temperatures it brings. Second is increased biodiversity. Even though water may not flow all year, moisture remains in the soil and provides sustenance for plants that need more water. It also provides niches for animals that would not be in the Open Space otherwise, either because they need additional moisture themselves or they depend on plants that do. Third, it can function as a migration corridor, providing constant cover and a variety of food sources.

Riparian habitat extends only as far as the influence of the water at its heart. This is rarely more than a hundred feet measured horizontally from the top of bank and is usually much less. Obviously it depends on the amount of water present and the nature of the terrain. A pond or spring will create an island of riparian habitat in a sea of whatever surrounds it, and a creek will create a ribbon of habitat along its course.

Although we fenced the area around Upper Twin Pond in Shell Ridge in the late 1990s to enhance its value as quail habitat, the Foundation did not begin to consider restoration of riparian habitat in its own right until about 2005.

Our first riparian restoration project was a tiny but more or less perennial creek in the Heather Farm Nature Area fed mainly by irrigation run off, hardly an ideal source because of the chemicals in it. Since the whole creek was choked with cattails, we cleared them out of the section we intended to restore. We wanted to create a different kind of riparian habitat to increase the biodiversity in the park. Once the cattails were largely gone, we took stock. Our remaining assets were trees – young cottonwoods, aging willows, and a variety of oaks – and some coyote bushes. We have tried a number of understory plants that have not done well; we are still looking for the combinations of species and placement that will work. We have done better with trees. We added a box elder and a willow and several of our acorn plantings are now oak seedlings.  The Heather Farm Nature Area Project is described more fully on the Heather Farm Park Restoration Page.

Our second riparian project was very small – a few oak trees near Deer Lake. It is in a grazed area, making restoration of anything smaller than trees very difficult. Even trees are not easy. Every acorn planting must be protected with well-anchored heavy fencing.

Our third project is Bayberry Pond, in many ways our most ambitious project to date. We were happy to have an opportunity to increase riparian habitat in Lime Ridge because it has less water than the other Open Space units. The riparian part of this project began in 2008 when we had the pond deepened, the first time we had done anything to change the land itself. We are hoping that our newly-improved pond will attract a variety of amphibians and provide drinking water well into the summer. However, while we wanted more and longer-lasting water in the pond, we did not want to create a perennial pond because we did not want to encourage the reproduction of the non-native and voracious bullfrogs. And as we did with the Heather Farm creek, we found some native species around the pond that we could use as a guide in doing restoration. The complete Bayberry story is in the separate article on Bayberry Pond.

March, 2009

  A pair of mallards dines at Bayberry Pond.  The orange flags mark cottonwood cuttings.

The job of clearing out cattails at Heather Farm begins

Three years later, finishing the last section

The newly-deepened Bayberry Pond had filled up by mid-February, 2009