Resorptive Landscapes / Rewetting Landscapes
Rocks were placed in the headwall of a gully to stop erosion. Rocks were then placed below the structure to slow water movement, thereby wetting the soil.
September 2020
July 2022
Rewetting increasingly arid landscapes
Restoration activities involve a broad array of projects designed to benefit the environment and/or stakeholder’s ability to access the environment. These activities can and should be rated in terms of their contributions to climate adaptation and climate mitigation. A subset of restoration activities can be seen as critical contributions to addressing the climate crisis, and these fall into a subclass of ‘nature-based solutions’. While these solutions are not a substitute for carbon emission reduction, they can contribute substantially to carbon draw-down over the next few decades. Given the current climate crisis, projects that provide maximum benefits to climate adaptation while concurrently reducing the fundamental causes of climate change are identified as ‘most valuable’.
In much of the western US, rewetting increasingly arid landscapes, both riparian areas and uplands, are believed to be in the “most valuable” class. These activities have been documented to increase conservation values and benefit specific targeted wildlife species while concurrently to enhancing overall biodiversity. The rewetting of the landscape also has immediate and long-term climate effects. Increased photosynthesis converts only a small fraction of solar energy to biomass, but the process also concurrently alters albedo, sensible, and latent heat fluxes. The net effect on temperatures is usually seen as the result of the combination of impacts on reflectivity (albedo) and latent heat which we normally think of as evapotranspiration. Further, both living and inanimate wetted surfaces have much higher heat capacities, which buffers temperature change. Long-term benefits include increased carbon removal from the atmosphere as a result of enhanced soil carbon sequestration associated with photosynthesis and carbon deposition into materials that do not decompose quickly. The ability of some soils to greatly increase their carbon storage is well known, and, if done over a sufficient area, has a very significant effect on the carbon cycle, at least at local to landscape scales. Do you want to mitigate your carbon footprint for one year? Find two acres of land and allow soil carbon storage to increase by only 1%, something that is easily doable with our often-degraded soils.
What are current best procedures?
Procedures reduce soil erosion and increase moisture retention across a variety of landscapes have been in place for centuries across multiple continents and multiple climates. Clearly, those that are at least carbon-neutral and can provide maximum benefits as described above are the most appropriate procedures to use in proactive restoration projects designed to provide climate-smart, conservation goals. In the arid and semiarid western US, procedures known from Ancestral Pueblo and other Southwestern Native American cultures are now seeing a resurgence of use. Among these are procedures and structures developed by Bill Zeedyk and his colleagues, a group based out of New Mexico. His simple procedures and structures provide low-tech, low cost, durable, and volunteer-driven ways to increase the wildlife benefits and ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, cooling) of landscapes at a local scale. Scaled up (reproduced in large numbers across entire landscapes), the structures are viewed as important ways to retard the speed of increasing aridity on Colorado landscapes.
There exists a second important reason for becoming more proactive on rewetting landscapes in Colorado, and that relates to the fact that riparian areas and wet meadows are more resistant and resilient to catastrophic fire. Thus, creating these wetter sites within a matrix that has a high (and now ‘higher’) probability of fire provides the potential to create biotic refugia such that subsequent recovery rates for the entire landscape are enhanced.
An extensive “how to do it” for Zeedyk structures is currently available from an online set of workshop talks.
Recently a number of articles show benefits of Zeddyk structures and related structures have appeared. See below:
The impacts of wetter soils in semiarid lands in terms of biotic, soil, and climatic changes have been documented and are well-understood by environmental biologists and scientists. What’s missing is – as is often the case – solid monitoring results following the restoration efforts. Monitoring has not been a part of restoration. Documentation of impacts therefore is also urged to be part of these types of restoration efforts.
Popular articles:
The Stream Whisperer: “Thinking Like Water” Restores Sage Grouse Habitat
Bugle Magazine | Thinking Like a Beaver
Wet Meadow & Riparian Restoration in Gunnison Sage-Grouse Habitats
Wet Meadow and Riparian Restoration – 2019 Wings Across the Americas Conservation Award
An Introduction to Erosion Control
Simple hand-built structures can help streams survive wildfires and drought