Hello.
It's 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, 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 know.
Let's get a design.
Let's, let's make some structures.
I'm just 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.
And that's what I wanted.
Okay.
So coming right in, you know, reminding yourself.
Riverscapes principles, reminding ourselves that streams.
Need space.
We're not going to start our design without the valley bottom mapped.
Okay.
It's always important to remind yourself
that definition of a valley bottom and a riverscape valley bottom.
Is the area,
of the landscape that could plausibly flood,
By the 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 into what.
The valley bottom was, right?
The rest of the space.
And so you. Mapped these, valley.
Bottom margins, mapped those fans
so, you knew what protruded out into the valley,
and you mapped the channel.
So you get the confining margin.
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 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.
It's kind of hard to see, so
We're going to zoom in.
We can zoom in here,
and we're going to.
Take you to tops.
Tops range.
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, it's kind of looking at, some fence lines and some other stuff.
So there you go.
There's pops ranch.
Okay, here's pops house.
There's this barn.
It's got a nice corral down here, some outbuildings, etc..
Okay.
And so what I've done is I've gone and.
Just, you know, because.
I've 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. Okay.
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.
Okay.
So this 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 status.
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,
use some vegetation indicators that use, what looked like.
Evidence of flooding on this floodplain.
You can see a little bit when you zoom in on this.
Is this perfect?
But I think it's reasonably defensible.
What did I come up with?
Well, I came up with when I mapped traced out the active channel in blue.
That's about four acres.
So it's about 5% of the valley bottom.
I marked the inactive portion.
That's 41.
So, 41 plus four is 45.
Subtract from 82.
I get my 37 acres.
So the.
Proportion of the valley, that's. Active is 50.
Percent and fits.
It's kind of dead smack in the middle here.
Right. And sort of a moderate condition.
So remember we looked at this, right?
So, you know, we're 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.
Archie Murphy 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.
You know, there is this sinuous single.
thread, but if you start zooming in, you know, this.
does have the feel of a channel that's and 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.
Right.
It's, so I think it's it's laterally active
is the right call.
So 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.
Anyway,
well,
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.
Has gone.
So in this.
Space right here.
Pops isn't really admitting that
it's active, 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, you know, the spring and this
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 taking somewhere else.
I'm making that up, too.
But this is a
interesting sort.
Of gap, because, you know what
It's 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 we were to use
proportion active as an indicator
of overall health, is actually
actually no uplift, right?
So what do we do in a situation like that?
Well, one conclusion is it's the reason you're funding.
It's 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.
I mean.
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. Yeah.
And he's fine to. Deal.
With adaptive management. So. 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,
you know, 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.
You know, this idea of.
You know, 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 that could be something worth exploring.
So what could pops, reach of Coburn.
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
weekly and asked opposing 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.
This sort of it's tendency.
Anyway,
and again, recovery potential can change over time.
Well, pops has a hypothetical daughter.
And, pops 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.
And, she saw the the map.
And she kind of got upset with pops.
And so, 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, in the summer,
but we do have this irrigation canal
right along here.
Okay.
And what she suggested is, yeah.
Let's, 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 recurring potential.
The same as pops up here.
But then she's conceding,
not just, I mean, pops is line was way back down here, right?
So she's. 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
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 see,
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,
it's 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 i
s defined by that gap
between condition recovery potential,
and that'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.