Hello. This is Joe Wheaton,
and we're going to start in on this design module.
Just getting off on the right foot.
And that is,
taking out of the planning phase,
what we learned,
and leading the design with recovery potential from that.
So we're here in module four talking about design,
in the restoration process.
We spent module three working through the planning.
Okay?
And it's easy to just kind of jump in and, like, you know.
You know, we're eager. Let's just —
Let's get a design.
Let's, let's make some structures.
I'm going to try and convince you of this,
never to start a design without that critical context from the planning phase.
Well, what context explicitly are we talking about?
Well, we're talking about getting the conditions
and the recovery potential.
And remember that in the design phase,
our alternatives, our design opportunities,
is really defined by the gap between condition and recovery potential.
And, you know, we've got to make this judgment call
on how many treatments will it take to get to that recovery potential.
And then if you— and once you get there,
what's it going to take for it to become self-sustaining?
Okay.
Oh, that's interesting. Not what I wanted.
Okay.
So. Coming right in,
reminding yourself of riverscapes principles,
reminding ourselves that streams need space.
We're not going to start our design without the valley bottom mapped.
Okay.
Always important to remind yourself that definition of a valley bottom,
and a riverscape.
The valley bottom is the area of the landscape that could plausibly flood,
by their rivers and streams in the natural contemporary flow regime.
The riverscape is just those valley bottoms
throughout the entire drainage network.
Okay.
So this is, this is our...
Our sort of mantra.
So let's go back to what you guys did yesterday.
In module three, you mapped the active channels,
you mapped the fans.
You did that to kind of back in to what the valley bottom was, right?
The rest of the space.
And so you mapped these valley bottom margins,
you mapped those fans.
So, you knew what protruded out into the valley,
and you mapped the channel.
So you get the confining margin,
and look at the position, on the valley floor.
So the green area is roughly what you derived.
Okay? That's your valley bottom.
Area that could plausibly flood in the contemporary natural flow regime.
Your design opportunity, as we said,
is defined by this gap between condition and recovery potential.
And so, what we talked about is,
both Weber and I talked about this,
is to get at least one expression of condition,
one indicator of condition.
We're going to split the valley bottom that we have here in yellow,
into these different, components,
but they're actually tier one geomorphic units
in the fluvial taxonomy.
So basically, active floodplain, active channel, inactive floodplain.
Okay, so...
We could do this for this whole thing.
But, at this scale, it's kind of hard to see.
So we're going to zoom in.
We're gonna zoom in here.
And we're going to take you to Pops...
Pops's ranch.
Okay.
So just a reminder, we said condition can be expressed.
by mapping the inactive portion of floodplains.
And we have this example here, okay.
And so, I've faked hypothetical property boundaries.
You know, just kind of looking at, some fence lines and some other stuff.
So there you go.
There's Pops's ranch.
Okay, here's Pops's house.
There's his barn.
It's got a nice corral down here, some outbuildings, etc.
And so what I've done is I've gone and just, you know,
because I was zoomed in, I can do a little nicer job.
First thing I did was I mapped the valley bottom.
I stopped it right here, right at the property line.
And it goes all along.
And notice here,
how I don't have the valley bottom Fall Creek mapped,
but the valley bottom, just the valley bottom of Coburn Creek.
And so this part that comes out, I think some of you know what this is.
It's really low angle, so it might be a little deceiving.
But this is the fan.
It's the fan of Coburn Creek. Okay?
Now it doesn't matter that this isn't really active fan, right,
necessarily, like active in the sense that this building could still
be kind of flooding a little bit.
But this is what we're dealing with, okay?
So this polygon is 146 acres.
And, if you want to go zoom around the map, you can.
This is 82 acres.
So this link is going to take you to this map,
and these games that I played.
So 82 acres of Coburn Creek valley bottom.
That's kind of what we're dealing with.
That's going to be our basis for normalization
of everything that we report.
Zoomed in here, you can see that
there is an area that's grazed.
There's also a bunch of little relic channels and stuff in here.
Not a relic, but like high stage channels, I should say.
There's actually some beaver dams, on the floodplain here.
Oddly, over here against the toe of this slope, too.
And there's evidence of run out.
If you zoom in, you will notice that there is a canal.
And that canal comes along here.
And, I don't know if these are just, trailing, by cows,
or if this is just kind of getting this water over to here,
and they just irrigate, flood irrigate this meadow.
But, that's some of the infrastructure.
There's also a fence that comes along.
You can basically make out the fence line all along there.
All right.
So, conditions.
I mapped out the inactive part of the floodplain.
Just based off of objective evidence of what it looked like was...
What was flooding.
Now, I used some vegetation indicators.
I used what looked like evidence of flooding on this floodplain.
You can see a little bit when you zoom in on this.
Is this perfect? Eh.
But I think it's reasonably defensible.
What did I come up with?
Well, I came up with when I mapped it, traced out the active channel in blue.
That's about four acres.
So it's about five percent of the valley bottom.
I mapped the inactive portion, that's 41.
So, 41 plus four is 45.
Subtract that from 82, I get my 37 acres.
So, the proportion of the valley bottom that's active is 50 percent.
It puts us kind of dead smack in the middle here.
Right in sort of a moderate condition.
So remember we looked at this, right?
So, you know, we're somewhere in,
you know, something, along these lines.
If we were to use the more expanded— which I think is useful here...
Stream evolution model,
it's probably in this laterally active condition.
Right? Our geomorphic conditions, it's laterally active.
I say that,
because the other candidate might be quasi equilibrium,
or stage one sinuous single thread.
If we go back, there is this sinuous single thread,
but if you start zooming in,
this does have the feel of a channel that's been pushed up
against that valley bottom,
our valley margin and valley bottom margin.
And it just feels like it's kicking everywhere it can.
There's a lot of active bank erosion, lateral widening.
Little hints in a few of these bends,
tendencies to build mid-channel bars and islands.
But just not multi-threaded, yet.
It's, so I think it's laterally active, is the right call.
Remember, we said the answer, you know, is recovery potential,
to this question of, how much is in play for restoration?
We're going to map that with pink, okay?
So recall, we have this valley bottom land use,
And notice how what we mapped is not a million miles off
what I was just showing you for the inactive versus active, right?
These are reasonably close.
Not bad considering we're doing it off of a pretty coarse resolution.
Well, we asked Pops about recovery potential. Okay?
So remember, recovery potential is the valley bottom,
minus what the landowner or the land manager is willing to accept.
This is an interesting exercise with good old Pops.
By the way, there is no such thing as Pops.
I just made this guy up.
Coming into this, the yellow area with 50%,
that qualifies as active, 50% qualifies as inactive.
Okay, so the active is the active floodplain and active channel.
Notice where pops put the pink line.
Okay. Tracks right here. Pretty good. Pretty good.
Then there's this, these real straight lines. Why?
Well, that's where his fences are.
Notice the fence goes right across this active, meander bend
that's laterally eroded into the fence, it's gone.
There's another spot here,
where the road, or a little trail, is gone.
So in this space right here,
Pops isn't really admitting that it's active,
He doesn't really see it as that, and that kind of makes sense.
He doesn't have his cows out here in the winter.
And his cows use this in the spring, and as a summer pasture.
He's actually pushing them up to higher ground in the summer.
So it's really kind of the spring and the fall,
and then the cows are taken somewhere else.
I'm making that up, too.
But this is an interesting sort of gap because,
what he's saying is that you could have 35% of this
for the river to, you know, do better with.
So the uplift, if we use this indicator,
or we were to use proportion active as an indicator of overall health,
there's actually no uplift, right? So what do we do in a situation like that?
Well, one conclusion is, if the reason you have funding,
if the reason you're interested in this,
you really do care about increasing the amount of valley bottom
that could be active...
Maybe this isn't the right project.
What he's come up with is logical. It's following the fence line.
We can dig in a little deeper here.
So how do you feel, Pops, about channel change and floodplain reconnection?
Well, he's able to give the stream some space to adjust
and push into the valley bottom, but not all of it. Okay.
Yeah, there's beaver there.
He's got no problem with them. They're kind of interesting.
So he's willing to allow that.
And he's fine to deal with adaptive management.
Okay, I mean maybe,
Maybe there's still some room to talk about this.
Maybe, a better indicator might be,
instead of one, relating to riverscape principle one,
streams need space,
maybe for this project with Pops, a better indicator might be
the proportion of the valley bottom, or the inundation extent at low flow.
Right.
So if we were to look at this, this reach,
this is actually a high flow that we're looking at,
sort of a bankful flow.
And if we were to look at it,
you could have some more structural forcing in here
that would lead to more connectivity.
So, pretty much that whole thing's free flowing right now.
Could we get some structure in there
that increases some of the inundation extent at low flows?
Yeah. That's—
That could be something worth exploring.
So what could Pop's reach of Coburn be?
Well.
Even if it's just in this recovery potential that he's willing to concede,
we might be able to get some more inundation area,
and we might be able to shift it to this stage 8,
sort of a weakly anastomosing system.
By the way, we call that wandering.
Maybe we could get a little bit of a wandering system in those few places
where there's space and he's willing to allow it.
Sort of it's tendency anyway, and again,
recovery potential can change over time.
Well, Pop's has a hypothetical daughter.
And, Pop's isn't going to be around forever.
And he likes his daughter a lot.
This daughter, you know, just loves the river.
She grew up here, loves the ranch,
and, yes, I'm making all this up.
She saw the the map, and she kind of got upset with Pops.
What she said is, "'Oh, come on. Really?"
I mean, we're just putting the cows out, and, you know,
whether or not it's us irrigating the pasture,
or whether or not it's, you know,
the river spreading out and doing this stuff,
the cows can get in there.
They can use that,
for the little bit that we use it in the spring, and the summer,
but we do have this irrigation canal right along here.
Okay.
And what she suggested is, yeah,
let's just go right off the irrigation canal.
This is gravity fed, so it wouldn't be a very easy thing to move.
It'd be expensive, etc.
They want to keep that operational, and so, this is her recovery potential,
The same as Pops up here, but then she's conceding,
not just, I mean, Pops's line was way back down here, right?
So she's conceding not just
that gap between that and the inactive floodplain boundary,
but saying, hey,
you could go all the way up to the canal, and then, you know,
once you get past the barn, hey,
and there's these few little beaver dams here,
and all the way down onto the fan of this thing.
I mean, this could really just spread out.
So by contrast, you know, she's got 63 acres of recovery potential,
76% of the valley bottom,
that, you know, that could come back.
So, the uplift potential is 22 acres, or 53%.
So that's pretty, that's pretty exciting.
And so.
You know, Pops, Pops may, you know,
Carol is the future, so he let's,
he lets her run the show.
So what could Carol's reach of Coburn be?
Well, up at the top there— right in here?
Maybe stage eight still, right?
However, towards the bottom, right, where we could spread out,
get across this whole thing,
really spread out into this fan, you know, maybe,
stage zero effectively, eventually.
So, this is just reinforcement of what we did in planning, right?
This is so fundamental.
Because this sets the boundary conditions for your design.
This sets, you know, how I'm going to approach this.
What's the target I'm shooting for?
Not necessarily that you're going to get there in your first design,
but It's a really, really helpful way to queue you up successfully.
So in conclusion, never start a design without that critical context from planning.
The design opportunity is defined by that gap
between condition and recovery potential.
Scott Shavarian's going to walk you through the design process
focusing at the complex scale, and inheriting these sorts of,
objectives, design objectives, out of what this planning process reveals.
Thank you very much.