This River Beneath the Sky by Doreen Pfost

Author:Doreen Pfost [Pfost, Doreen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT029000 Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Rivers
ISBN: 9780803285347
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2015-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Kenny Dinan and Kirk Schroeder have spent their careers helping private landowners who make the decision to improve habitat on their portions of the Platte. Kenny and Kirk are based in Grand Island and work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife program. At the end of a daylong wetland seminar in Hastings, they joined me at the conference center lounge to tell me about their work. Kenny is the Partners’ program coordinator for Nebraska, and Kirk is assistant coordinator. While their responsibilities cover the whole state, much of their work, especially Kirk’s, has focused on the Platte River.

The Partners program provides assistance, both financial and technical, to private landowners who want to improve habitat on their property. Along the Platte, Kenny and Kirk have worked with over 150 landowners — including farmers and “recreational owners,” who use their property mostly for hunting and other outdoor pursuits. They also work cooperatively with the Nature Conservancy, the Crane Trust, Rowe Sanctuary, and most recently, the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program.

“So many species rely on this system,” said Kenny. “It’s not just restoration for its own sake.” Restoration along the Platte River can have many meanings and many phases. The first Partners’ projects were limited to channel clearing — cutting trees, brush, and weeds from the riverbed, islands, and banks. But complete habitat restoration calls for restoring — or sometimes re-creating — a complex, integrated system of open channels, sandbars and low islands, backwater sloughs, and wet meadows.

In the early 1990s Kenny and Kirk began to construct backwater sloughs — areas of slow or standing water that are “hydrologically connected” to the river through groundwater flows but are outside the current. One of the first efforts was a series of sloughs at Rowe Sanctuary. North of the main channel but still within the riverbed, the sloughs were created with excavation equipment to remove riverbed sand — just deep enough to intersect with the water table. The reexposed groundwater generally percolates into the sloughs all summer, providing water for wildlife even when surface flows have dried up. In the winter the relatively warm groundwater keeps the sloughs open when the rest of the river is frozen, so overwintering waterfowl have a place to roost.

Later projects included wet-meadow restorations — re-creating wetlands in abandoned channels and reestablishing native plant communities. And most recently Kenny and Kirk have recontoured river channels to build nesting islands for least terns and piping plovers.

Habitat restoration on the Platte is both a science and an art. They take pride, Kirk told me, in visiting or flying over a completed project, like a restored meadow, after five years and being able to say, “You can’t tell that this meadow hasn’t always been here.”

Their goal, they tell me, is to restore substantial areas of habitat within each bridge segment — the six- to twelve-mile stretches between bridge crossings — along the river. Usually the process starts with a conservation organization that owns a large parcel in a given bridge segment.

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