04 C Design Recovery Potential

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,

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 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.

not what I wanted.

Okay.

So coming right in, 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,

you 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 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, it's 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'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.

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 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
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.

and 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 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 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.

It's, so I think it's
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

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

there's actually no uplift, right?
So what do we do in a situation like that?

Well, one conclusion is,
if the reason you're 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. 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,

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
that could be something worth exploring.

So what could pops, 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
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.

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.

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 is 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 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 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 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.