OAEC “Fuels to Flows” PBR in the Uplandscape
Occidental Arts & Ecology Center WATER Institute Implementor
Four unnamed Class III, Order 1 watercourses
Dutch Bill Creek (Lower Russian River)
Oct. 01, 2021
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Project Goals and Objectives
The Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC) “Fuels to Flows” PBR in the Uplandscape project is an innovative pilot that demonstrates the creative re-utilization of organic biomass to improve the water quantity and quality of four upland Class III, Order 1 watercourses on-site. We strategically placed slash material generated from our defensible space and fuel load mitigation work into areas where head-cutting and channel incision are occurring in order to reduce erosion and sediment delivery downstream. Other potential co-benefits of this project include: fire resiliency, forest health, durable carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, soil health, money and time savings, just job training and workforce development, and overall landscape resiliency. OAEC estimates that we packed a total of 992 feet of channel with approximately 10,109 cubic feet of “slash” generated from our fuels mitigation work. Utilizing a carbon calculator, we estimate that this represents nearly 151,635 pounds or 75.82 tons of carbon sequestered into a long-term durable form. This material will compost over-time and provide innumerable habitat, forest health and water conservation benefits, rather than choking out our forests and left standing as an extreme fire hazard and potential greenhouse gas emission. In addition to water conservation and retention, we have also observed a plethora of wildlife habitat benefits. For example, California slender salamander and Ensatina have been documented in the moist habitat of our on-contour brush piles as well as the native redwood sideband snail. Leaf litter life plays an important role in our ecosystems, including in nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration as “predators on shredder and decomposer arthropods,” according to Welsh and Hodgson 2013. Multiple rough-skinned newts have also been documented in the two pools we retained and enhanced for breeding habitat in the Below Spillway location. OAEC collaborates with North Bay Jobs with Justice (NBJwJ) and Resilience Works (owned by the nonprofit Resilience Force) in their effort to train and employ immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers in Sonoma County for dignified climate resilience careers with family sustaining wages. Since 2022, we have co-hosted a series of workforce development trainings at OAEC’s 80-acre Field Campus with NBJwJ and Resilience Works. Offered in Spanish, these trainings have focused on fire mitigation and vegetation management, wildlife habitat restoration, and upland Fuels to Flows waterway restoration techniques.
Structure Construction Elements
In the majority of the areas where incision is occuring, we placed fresh green bows (of either conifer, hardwood and/or non-native broom) parallel to the watercourse, limb-by-limb in the channel with the tips facing upstream in an interlocking fashion. We also supplemented with finer material, including hardwood leaves, weed-free straw on site from fuel load mitigation projects. This process of strategic parallel placement typically begins at the active knickpoint of a headcut, followed by filling contiguous segments of entrenched channel downstream, and, in some cases, targeting isolated incised locations with biomass “plugs” to increase the aggradation of the watercourse. The goal was to weave brush together into a dense matrix and ensure thorough contact between biomass and the bed/banks of the receiving channel to increase filtration surface area. The end result was a densely packed but porous matrix that disperses the flow/energy of water while trapping soil and leaf litter particles, disallowing further erosion and incision of the channel and mitigating headcut migration. Once enough flexible, green biomass material was placed to fill the height and width of the channel. We placed larger woody material on top to compress and hold the structure in place and, as needed, pounded in vertical wooden stakes (sourced from onsite redwood limbs) to fix its location. In cases where the channel was more depositional, we also followed-up this treatment by placing woody material perpendicular to the channel in a semi-circle shape that spanned the width of the depositional zone.
Project Photos
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