Yeah I see a silverjaw in there too. Nice stuff
<sigh>
They clear the banks because that's how they've always done it. I'm not even sure I know what the answer is and I don't know how to get anything different across to the people in charge, even at the county level (We joke the local extention offices are known as the "Soil IN Water Conservation Districts"
![:)](http://forum.nanfa.org/public/style_emoticons/default/icon_smile.gif)
).
We're looking at these ditches right now in the Sandusky Watershed. And it's extremely frustrating, especially when I know I could be working on this problem in a watershed where it really would make a difference for a less tolerant biota, or even one where people just care about the quality of the watershed. Sadly, in the Huron Erie Lake Plain (appropriately abbreviated the HELP), everything that could have gone is gone.
I mean, here I am, talking to a guy, who has a 10th grade education (not that I'm anything special with my fancy degrees), won't read anything I hand him, who thinks this way is fine, "it's worked for years", and I'm a real rotten big mouthed liberal a-hole if I try and _suggest_ anything different. What do you do?
We were out with one such fella last week (I don't know that he's as extreme as my generalization), and he got defensive when I was debating among my colleagues what amount of channel evolution was enough to satisfy one type of habitat to contrast the trapezoidal <ahem> habitat. This was us talking shop, and it certainly didn't have any moral judgement attached to it. He was ready to tear into me. And he's one of the cooperative guys!
He insists that we're standing in places where there "weren't fish never before" (although that's quite the contrary, if he'd pick up a book) and that I'm attacking people's livelihoods. Any argument they can make, so that they can do whatever it is that they see fit to do, regardless of what costs the rest of society is paying for their choices.
This is the exact reason Findlay, OH has made the national news not once but TWICE in the last year due to getting flooded out. Conveyance in the Blanchard is SO good now, that during a peak event, it all piles up at the I-75 bridge (the first bottleneck), backs up, and floods the downtown of a reasonably sized municipality. And guess who's paying for the damage? Know what the decade climate models are for our area? Warmer and WETTER, with bigger events. Lord have mercy if we get a 10" storm here. A 7" about put every one out of business.
One answer is an oversized channel that allows vegetated benches to form while 1) maintaing subsurface drainage [good for fields] 2) maintaining a primary channel [good for sediment assimilation and biota] and 3) quadrupling the storage at lower gradient (dig sideways, not down) [good for reducing peak pulse]. It cuts down on velcoity of discharge, creates storage and uses herbaceous plants to create channel roughness, which gets a lot less people up in arms (although willows are better). We're asking for 15 feet (that the government will pay for) and you'd think we were asking for the sacrifice of their first born at dawn.
Susan saw what a difference an overwide makes first hand in the Portage River watershed. Would you believe a DITCH that scored 45-50 on an IBI? Greenside darter were the domiant species with suckers right behind them. Pimephales minnows had probably (although I can't say this for sure) the lowest abundances in the whole assemblage.
Now... the money that went into that installation was
ridiculous and I can't tell if the effect was from the over wide or the willows downstream that slow stuff down. There were bigger benches out of the modified segment then in it
![:)](http://forum.nanfa.org/public/style_emoticons/default/icon_smile.gif)
But I'll bet those willows are sprayed in the next year or two and brush hogged like we see in Susan's Bad Creek photo. So we'll see if it holds.
A more aggressive potential answer is to hire a GIS savvy hydrologist and an economist and let them come up with a footage assessed "coefficient of contribution" to any peak flooding. It'd take them about a week. Want to do what you want to do? Fine. Spray. Dip out. But pay for your damages, dangit. What about the livelihoods of the people who's shops took 100% losses on their merchandise and were out of business for 6 weeks during cleanup, only to go and do it all over again 4 months later, when they no longer could GET flood insurance because of the first flood?
The answer is probably somewhere in the middle of all that. And I can gaurantee I'll be out of this area before that answer arrives. There's more productive causes to wage if I'm going to have persist for any particular cause.
<sigh> Back to ordination and discriminant analysis. What a silver lining.
Todd
Edited by farmertodd, 29 April 2008 - 04:04 PM.