Riparian Restoration
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Riparian Restoration Experiment
by Robin Hale, Laura Williams, Tim Cavagnaro and Sam Lake (Monash University) and Paul Reich (Arthur Rylah Institute, Dept of Sustainability & Environment)
Often riparian restoration projects are either monitored poorly or not monitored at all. As a consequence, we have a poor understanding of how riparian zones and streams respond to restoration efforts, and what indicators should be used to monitor changes. Since 2004, an experiment has been underway in the southern Murray-Darling Basin to evaluate the ecological responses to restoration of river red gum-dominated riparian zones along five small, intermittent lowland streams.
Along each stream, a ~1 km long treatment site has been fenced to exclude livestock and planted with native tube-stock, and a ~1 km long control site has been left with unchanged land practices. Monitoring at both sites began at least 12 months prior to restoration, and focussed on a large range of variables selected from the following six groups:
- contextual variables (e.g. land use and hydrology),
- geomorphology and soils,
- vegetation (riparian and macrophytes),
- litter and coarse wood,
- water quality (including nutrients) and
- fauna (fish, benthic macroinvertebrates, birds).
Despite a severe drought affecting all sites between 1997 and 2010, a number of responses to restoration have been observed. For example, there have been reductions in bare ground and increases in plant and litter cover at our treatment sites, relative to controls. Successful recruitment of river red gum seedlings has also occurred at some sites. Insufficient time has passed to evaluate whether aquatic responses will occur; however, macrophytes, fish and aquatic macroinvertebrates have all declined in response to drought. Results also illustrate that livestock exclusion may increase the ability of some birds and macrophytes to persist through drought. Monitoring will continue to document ecological responses over longer time periods.
In November 2010, a workshop was held to discuss the lessons and findings of the project. The workshop was aimed at discussing ways to improve monitoring and reporting of riparian restoration projects, and was attended by representatives from the range of natural resource management agencies across the Murray Darling Basin. Two important constraints to effective riparian restoration and monitoring were identified:
- a lack of ecological evidence on the effects of restoration efforts, and
- short-termism in commitment to restoration efforts, funding of monitoring and expected time spans of ecological responses.
Four key areas of future research were identified:
- the importance of landscape context to restoration outcomes,
- spatio-temporal scaling of restoration outcomes,
- improved understanding of the functional effects of restoration efforts and
- developing informative and effective indicators of restoration.
Workshop participants advocated a hierarchical adaptive management framework, incorporating long-term ecological research, to begin to address these key knowledge gaps. Further details of the Riparian Restoration Experiment and the workshop can be found here. The Ecological Management and Restoration Journal Vol 12, No 1, April 2011 contains two articles relating to this project.
This work has been supported by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, several catchment management authorities, landholders, and state government natural resource management departments from Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
26 May 2011 10:23 am
