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Faith: We're at Howard's Branch which is a
project that's about 10 years old. It's
a sand seepage wetlands stream complex.
And I'm standing here with Ron and Kevin
and Keith. Ron, this is the first
project that the county was involved in
of this sort and type. Tell us a little
bit about the background on the project.
Ron: Okay, you're correct. This is an
entirely new technique that was first
introduced to us a little over 10 years
ago I guess, upwards of 12 years ago.
And the origin of the project itself,
the valley floor here actually was part
of a reservoir of water for a water
production facility. It's a little
further downstream here. It was serving
the one community up to our left. And
what had transpired over the years is
the dam structure for the reservoir
itself had deteriorated in a fairly
significant storm event, a downpour of
rain overwhelmed that dam structure and
there was a catastrophic failure of the
wall of water then washed its way down
to the tidal waters down below. But what
was left behind was this valley floor
that was pretty much filled over many
years with the sediment that transported
in behind the dam structure itself. And
after the dam failure itself, the
sediments were progressively being moved
out of the valley floor on downstream.
It was cutting a channel. It was
meandering through those legacy
sediments and transferring a lot of
material downstream.
At that time, Keith Underwood, the
innovator behind the technique that was
deployed here and the number of other
residents in the communities that are
nearby here, had been advocating for
this new technique that Keith had come
up with relative to how to restore these
kinds of degraded systems. And that
basically led to our first journey as it
relates to a creation of a wetland of
this nature.
Faith: So Keith, we're standing on a
wetland complex. What's the significance
with this within kind of the history of
the area?
Keith: From a biologic standpoint, I
have always had strong interest in
plants and then led to rare plants. In
1996, a colleague, Phil Sheridan and
myself conducted a survey, a biological
survey of all the remaining Atlantic
white cedar, remaining west of the
Chesapeake Bay. The trees that you see
around here are associated with numerous
other rarities, the picture plants, the
sundews, the carnivorous plants, the bog
orchids. In fact, the vast majority of
our rare threatened and endangered
species for this area here. So we began
efforts to look for opportunities to
restore those organisms. What we found
in that inventory was 1214 live
individuals above a meter in height on
10 sites here. And that set off the
alarm bells that we really needed to
begin restoration sites.
Faith: So particular to that Atlantic
white cedar kind of complex. So
everything that we're looking at here
has been put in and built up, kind of
capped over the existing millpond
sediment.
Keith: Right.
Faith: So all of this has been planted
to restore that kind of environment.
Keith: Well we initially pursued
opportunities to restore the degrading
natural sites and it was clear that we
were not going to get permits for that.
So we began efforts to find, to locate
opportunities to synthesize the
conditions to create these backup
populations on degraded sites and this
was the site selected for a number of
reasons.
Faith: So Kevin, I can hear the frogs in
the background as we're talking. So this
really has a lot of habitat potential as
the water is spread out into these
different wetland environments. Say a
little more about that.
Kevin: Well it's quite different here
than it was you know 12 years ago when
this was first proposed. And at that
time it was just a single thread channel
moving through these unconsolidated
sediments with very little habitat
value. We shocked the stream for fish
and found no fish in there, some frogs
and some eels at that time so very
little habitat value at that time. The
flood plan was mostly rice cut grass
with some red maples coming up. Today
you look at it and you see a vast
difference in the complexity of the
habitat and the species that are out
here. And as I said earlier, we saw, you
know we've already identified three
species of frogs already and just today
and the wood ducks that are here and
then the fish that are in the stream and
all the variety of plants that exist out
here and some of them very rare. So
quite a big difference from what it was
12 years ago.
Faith: I imagine there's a lot of
maintenance involved in this still that
we don't really see currently but a lot
of community involvement in taking care
of invasive – do you have problems with
invasive species coming in down here?
Keith: No this side is essentially self
manning at this point in time. Yes, as
you look around, the vast majority of
the cedar that you see here back behind
us is recruitment from natural rainfall.
The cedars were planted here as a seed
source. We bucked the conventional US
Forest Service approach to attempting to
restore cedar stands simply because
there wasn't enough material remaining.
We devised a method to get the trees up
in a nursery operation large enough to
provide their own seed rain and begin
colonizing the site on its own volition
here.
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