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Identify opportunities for water retention on your land and discuss the economic impact of water scarcity on your operation.
Discussion #1: Share your experiences and learn from others. Discuss the costs associated with water scarcity and explore strategies for effective water retention.
Make a Post:
– Describe the water scarcity issues present on your land.
– Estimate the economic impact of water retention/scarcity on your operation.
– Include pictures, videos, or observations.Respond to Others: Engage with fellow landowners, share your expertise, and learn from others.
– Collaborate on strategies for effective water retention.
– Discuss the benefits and challenges of implementing LTPBR on your land. -
My project is multi-pronged, two with fairly controllable outcomes and one crap shoot.
1) The conifer mitigation is chainsaw work to increase water availability to grasses and water bodies. At a small scale it involves me and my chainsaw. At a large scale it is a grant-funded endeavor with a hired crew. Work in the summer will be determined by the fire conditions for saw work and vehicle access.
2) The construction of 7-10 BDAs in Cottonwood Creek is limited by permitting and manpower.
3) The eventual restoration of beaver to Cottonwood Creek will be determined by a site visit in March that will gauge suitability and advise goals for restoration work with beaver transplants in mind, and then the regulatory process and paperwork will be determined by the outcome of the EA decision in April. If the EA is not approved, the regulatory process is expensive, arduous, and possibly not worth the effort.
The timeline is uploaded, I think.
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Hi, Everyone!
Because my project is on forest service land, it will need to be no cost. I have been doing research to understand the history of the area we’d like to see restored, if we are allowed to. I posted photos in Module 2.
I did hear back from one of the cabin owners on Lake Mullen, and what he wrote is discouraging because of the human impact over the years. Here is what he said,
“Good afternoon Judy
I received your message last nite and did some thinking. I’ve been roaming around the hills at the cabin since I was old enough to walk. We used to get dropped off at the 9 mile, Homestake pass or Roosevelt Drive and hike to the cabin. I’ve even been to the headwaters of the North Fork of Little Pipestone Creek. It comes out of some rocks in the middle of a hillside. I don’t think there was much mining going on, mostly logging. There are some glory holes here and there are remenents of old logging wagons harnesses and yolks.
At the prospectors cabin a man named Oscar Blixt had the only working mine in the near area.He was a quiet man and never said much at one time his mine went in about 150 feet.
To my knowledge there were never any man made dams. At one time there were 3 beaver dams.The largest was straight out from the prospectors cabin.The second one was upstream and the smallest was downstream from the large dam.
According to Joan Shannon the pond at the cabin was just an over grown beaver dam.It was either her father or grandfather decided to enlarge it with some dynamite.
When we were small my uncle swam out to the center of the pond and could not touch bottom.I would guess the water was at least over 6 to 7 feet deep.
There was a saw mill at Oassis and another one half way between the Toll Mountain campground and the highway.
Over the years people would break the beaver dams and drain all the mud and silt down into the pond causing the pond to fill up.
I used to snow shoe with Mrs. Koch and her husband and she told me the wood cut up around the cabin was used in the mines in Butte and to fire the brick kilns down by the ZbarT.
I hope this information is useful and I would like to get involved in your project if you need any help.
Keep me posted
Thanks
Jim”I will continue to do more research and have sent Jim additional questions. I would love to reintroduce beavers to the area, but that would involve MTFWP, and I am not sure if the area can be protected from trapping.
There is so much to consider!
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Some of the water scarcity issues on my land include the river not flooding the valley bottom for the last 2 years and it’s not looking very likely for this spring either. The slough on the east side of the river serves as a source of stock water, both for cattle on the bench and we pump water to the top of Big Mountain just east of there for summer pasture. It’s the only source of water for miles around up there and is very crucial to our ranch but is also greatly appreciated by the wildlife in the area. For 2 years now I’ve had to bring the cattle home several weeks early because the slough has run dry. This impacts the grass I’ve banked for fall and winter grazing enormously. I would like to figure out what I can do to mitigate that.
This first photo is a picture Big Mountain where we pump the water to in the summer. The next two are of the river bottom, and they’re not very good but it shows the river and slough areas where the willows are which is what we pump from. The last photo is of a bear swimming in our tank just for fun!
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Howdy all,
Water scarcity seems to be on everyone’s minds- given our dismal snowpack, water woes have started earlier than usual this year. My job as a consultant is natural resource management (namely in habitat improvement). Water is a finite resource; we can’t make more of it, so we have to learn how to use it smarter. Many large ranches I work with are multi-faceted in both landscape and also overall objective. Not only do these ranches want to make a profit (from ag or cattle) but most want to be good stewards of the land and make habitat improvements for wildlife. Being toward the top of the watershed, in a time where everyone is calling for more water, if LTPBR can help us store more water for longer, it seems like a win- win for land owners. Increasing water residency, increasing forage availability and diversity for both cattle and wildlife, decreasing sediment load, and increasing water availability for downstream users OR keeping more water in our rivers for our beloved non-native trout 😉
Apologies for the wide-lens blanket approach to this post. I have several projects I would like to use LTPBR on- got me thinking about how many installs it would take to see a larger scale, rather than localized, impact.
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I think the mod4 post is supposed to be “aha” moments from the mod4 materials that springboards from our mod3 post.
I didn’t have any aha moments, but module 4 did reinforce how cool it would be to have pre-identified & approved high country habitat for beaver so that when lowland conflict on the big rivers (Boulder & Jefferson) occurs, there is a place or places to transplant the beaver, ready to go.
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<p data-start=”121″ data-end=”136″>Hey everyone,</p>
<p data-start=”138″ data-end=”724″>I just got back from the American Fisheries Society meeting where biologists, fish managers, restoration practitioners, and other fisheries professionals presented their projects and research. BDAs and beaver reintroduction came up repeatedly, and I was surprised by how polarized the views were. On one side were ecological restoration and water-storage advocates who strongly supported beavers and BDAs, and on the other were several fisheries biologists who described beaver dams as major impediments to fish migration, especially for bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout.</p>
<p data-start=”726″ data-end=”1374″>I can see how dams could create passage challenges, particularly during low-flow periods or in already incised or simplified channels. At the same time, beavers historically dominated these landscapes, and native trout species evolved alongside them and were once thriving. That makes me wonder if the issue is less about beaver dams themselves and more about modern stream conditions, altered hydrology, and how or where BDAs are implemented.</p>
<p data-start=”1376″ data-end=”1576″>I’m curious how others think about the trade-off between connectivity and habitat complexity, and whether seasonal or partial passage might still support healthy fish populations in certain systems.</p>
<p data-start=”1578″ data-end=”1714″ data-is-last-node=”” data-is-only-node=””>Also, process-based restoration was featured in two major river restoration presentations, which was really cool to see highlighted at that scale.</p> -
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Water scarcity: In centuries/millennia prior, our land would be occasionally flooded. I’m not sure how often that would occur, or if it even occurred on a regular basis. However, because the flow rate for the Jefferson Slough temporarily ceased in the early 1900s, and because the current flow rate is checked, I don’t think it has flooded in living memory.
Scott found that the Jefferson Slough was a major historical channel of the Jeff, but after a large flood near the early 1900s it became closed off. The slough was subsequently reopened as an irrigation channel, I think he said in the 40s or 50s.
Our land is pocketed depressions and gullies, and potentially old oxbow channels that have stagnant water in them. If using a rotational grazing system as I have experimented with in the past, we have multiple areas that are difficult to use without trucking water to them.
I’m not sure if getting in some installations on the slough, slowing down the water and increasing the water table, might also increase and refresh the water that seeps up in the depressions. If it did, that would seriously improve the ease of integrating a rotational grazing system with ruminants on this land. I’m not gonna hold my breath, but it’s something I’ll be monitoring before/after the installations take place just out of curiosity 🙂
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Strategies for water retention:
I am very grateful for all of the water retention ideas that have come from the course and the field trips that I was lucky to attend. I’m excited to try out a variety of structures at our place when the time comes. In the meantime, I am excited to help others with their vision (sometimes it’s nice to not have to make the decisions and just be told what to do, especially during the learning phase). Please feel free to throw me where I’m most useful!
Also, shout out to Torrey Ritter, who had some great advice for the plots we visited with Holly Harper and crew last Wednesday. Thanks so much for inviting us all along for such an information-packed day. Nothing beats a field day when it comes to educational value!
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Water retention with a focus on soil:
The only unique strategy that I bring to the table here is reintegrating the microbiology into the soil. There are many methods to do this, and I can talk about them in depth in a later post. To keep the focus on water retention, I copied a link for a short video from the Soil Food Web School below, but full disclosure—>I watch it with the volume off and read the subtitles. When you hear his voice, you’ll understand. But, out of all the videos I know about, it provides the most concise description of the water-related issues that arise in a substrate that lacks bacteria and/or fungi. The video details how these microorganisms do the work to catch water for you. This important work can raise your water table since more of the water that falls as precipitation will be absorbed rather than flowing away as runoff.
The video I recommend watching with sound off and subtitles on:
These process-based watershed restoration techniques have some similarities and differences with the soil restoration that I do. In some ways, the two go hand in hand, and overlap with similar goals. I would also hope that the soil biology restoration techniques I describe here can be used to help mitigate weeds that would occur as a result of disturbance from process based installations in the future, but I’ll work out the methodology specifics for a future study as time goes on. Here are some thoughts about how the two methods may compare or contrast:
From a “soil biology restoration” perspective, the process of recharging your aquifer and increasing the soil sponge would involve reintroducing the native, locally adapted organisms in their proper balances along the tracts of land that are outside of the direct floodplain. (The aerobic organisms are not going to survive in areas that are remain flooded for most of the year, so this effort would focus on the soil-sponge capabilities outside of flooded areas.)
The process of soil restoration starts with assessing the biomass of organisms in the soil by taking soil samples and physically counting the active organisms under the microscope using a consistent sampling strategy. After that, the goal is to create an aerobic compost* that is biologically complete with an array of organisms from four major functional groups, or at least containing the organisms that the substrate is lacking. The compost always gets checked with the microscope before being applied to the soil to ensure you actually got the organisms that are lacking in the soil.
*If you know someone who tried compost to remediate soil and it didn’t work or only had marginal effects, I just want to say that biologically active compost is more than just decomposed matter and a mix of nutrients. Biologically active compost and is like a kombucha starter. It has the power to transform a substrate into something that acts like a loam, and can transform the vegetative structure to exclude early-succession plants such as weeds. The only way to know for sure if a compost will benefit any stretch of land is to check it with the microscope and observe the type of organisms—good, bad, or neutral—that are present and in what quantities. The microscope does not need to be an<span style=”font-size: 1.6rem;”> inexpensive model ($350).</span>
In my view, a waterway restoration project will increase water retention and at the same time can increase the capacity for the beneficial microorganisms because the ground is getting more moisture, causing a greater diversity of plants show up, and therefore photosynthesis happens more consistently and for a longer duration throughout the year. The microorganisms will naturally flourish in such an abundant environment with water at hand and abundant food available through both decomposition and photosynthesis (plants release compounds to attract the bacteria or fungi species they want). The more the land can retain moisture but still remain aerated, the more these organisms will flourish. As the organisms flourish, they continue to create pore spaces that allow more water to soak into the soil. Thus, they go hand in hand, but the two types of restoration techniques meet at the shoreline and in the interstitial places between “water” and “land.”
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sorry for the weird formatting and typos. that sentence should read:
*does not need to be an expensive model (the one I use costs $350).
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Additionally, it’s relatively easy to learn about soil microbes, how to identify them and discern the beneficial vs. “problem” organisms (or microbes that are indicator of problems, such as anaerobic conditions caused by compaction and/or waterlogging). Anyone can learn how to do basic identification, especially with the help of cameras. They even make attachments to hook up your phone to a microscope and act as a camera.
If you have your own microscope and a network of folks that can share photos, insight, and ID help, the learning curve can be 100% self-led with minimal costs. I am working on some lesson plans for free workshops here locally. I am also contemplating a grant through JVCF to donate a microscope and camera to the local library. But I think the educational workshops should come first.
My goal is to make it possible for everyday people to observe these organisms and empower them to get sense for soil conditions just by glancing at microbe activity. The microbes will tell you if there is enough aeration, nutrient cycling, etc., to support the plants on your land.
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