04 C Design Recovery Potential

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, this idea of,

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 eight,

sort of a weakly anastomosing system.

By the way, we call that wandering.

So 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.

And 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 lets,

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.