Tag Archives: grassland

Timelapse Photography of a Wetland Restoration

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Last fall, we finished construction on a wetland restoration project along a creek through our Platte River Prairies.  In an earlier post I described some of the issues we had with excess organic matter that mounded up as we filled in the old gravel mine pits.  We ended up spreading that sludge out over a portion of the site, and it looks like it may just degrade on its own, so we’re going to let it sit for a season and see what happens.

Regardless of the sludge, the wetland project is one that I’m very happy with, and I’m really looking forward to watching the plant and other ecological communities establish over time.  I’m also excited to see the shape of the channels and adjacent wetlands change as groundwater and stream flow levels rise and fall through the years.  The project was designed to be dynamic; change is as essential to the future success of the project as any of the wetland construction or wetland seedings we did.

This photo was taken in March, 2012. It's multiple photos stitched together into a panorama. The water was pretty high at the time of the photo, merging together what will be more separate pools and channels when the water levels are lower. The sludge in the distant background of the photo, so the foreground shows mainly bare sand and water - which was planted over the winter with a mixture of locally-harvested wetland seeds.

Because change is such a major emphasis of our project, it fits perfectly into an initiative headed up by Michael Forsberg and Michael Farrell.  The Platte River Timelapse Project is designed to merge art and science by using new technology to showcase the dynamic nature of the Platte River and all that it affects.  We were fortunate enough to become a partner in the project early on, and Forsberg installed a timelapse camera at the site prior to the beginning of the latest construction phase.  That camera takes one photo every hour during daylight hours, and documents the changes that take place in front of it.  The plan is to leave it in place for many years.  Even better,  we hope to have two more cameras up and running within the next several weeks, greatly increasing our ability to tell the story of this wetland.

Here is the timelapse of our project through the end of March.  If your internet service is like mine, the video may be a little jerky the first time through, but if you just click play again and rewatch it after the first time, it runs much more smoothly.  The whole video is only 52 seconds long.  You can see the construction equipment at work as they reshape the topography, and then watch the wildlife response – especially during the spring bird migration.  As the season progresses, the video will be updated with new footage, and we’ll be able to watch the establishment of the vegetation and the rise and fall of water levels.

There are lots of other timelapse videos you can watch on the same website.  As a starting point, I strongly recommend this terrific series from the top of a tower at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary, showing the Platte River, sandbars, and lots of sandhill cranes.  During  the first minute or so, the movements of the roosting sandhill cranes are fascinating.  Starting at about 1:30, though, the story becomes the waves of sediment rolling down the channel – very clearly demonstrating the primary role of rivers… to move sediment.

Stay tuned!  I’ll post more video of our wetland project when it becomes available.  In the meantime, they’ll continue to update all of the other footage at the Platte River Timelapse site too, so you can return now and then to see what’s changing.

The Value of a Good Field Notebook

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One of the most powerful tools of a prairie manager is a field notebook.  There’s no substitute for recording observations and ideas as they happen.  Memories can fade, but notes don’t (as long as you don’t drop them in a stream).

There are multiple roles for a field notebook.  First, just writing a paragraph or two a year about each management unit, combined with a couple of photos, can form the backbone of a very nice basic monitoring system.  Additional data are nice too, of course, but it’s really helpful  just to note the general appearance of a site and the apparent impacts of management treatments and weather.  I try to visit every site I manage late in the season to make these observations, and then use those thoughts and ideas to help guide my management planning for the next year.

Sometimes photos can be important companions to field notes as a way to better describe the appearance of a site. This photo of a second-year prairie planting does a much better job than I could have done with text to capture the abundance of annual sunflowers. The photo is especially interesting to look at now, when the planting has matured (it's now 7 years old and has a well-established and diverse prairie plant community.)

Second, it’s important to record any interesting sightings of species or species behavior.  Sometimes those observations are important by themselves because they can indicate changing conditions in your prairie.  For example, seeing your first Henslow’s sparrow might indicate that a management strategy to provide more thatchy habitat is paying off.  Other times, the observations might be mildly interesting at the time, but become even more valuable later, when you look back and realize that they were part of a larger pattern of change.  After multiple seasons, for instance, you might notice that a particular species was present or especially abundant in years with a management treatment or weather pattern.

Third, tracking the impacts of specific management actions is critically important, especially when you’re trying something new.  When I conduct formal experiments, I collect data on separate datasheets and store them as part of a larger file on that research project.  However, most of my experimentation is much less structured, and my field notebooks are full of observations and thoughts about the impacts of various little trials. Looking back at those observations has helped me hone our techniques over time.  For example, I’ve tried multiple variations on our standard prairie seeding rates in little corners of most of our restoration sites.  Recording the results of those, and then looking over those cumulative records has helped me adjust our strategies over time.

Finally, if you’re like me, many of your best management and restoration ideas come while walking around the prairie.  Capturing those on the spot can ensure you don’t lose them, and can also help record whatever observation or circumstance led you to come up with the idea in the first place.  Of course, writing down those ideas is only helpful if you look at your notes later…

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