This summer, the public got a first look at the Ohio River Basin Restoration and Protection Plan. While the final draft is still under development, the initial 93-page report laid out nine broad challenges facing the entire, 204,000-square-mile basin. The issues range from toxic pollution to invasive species to extreme flooding.
The plan – coauthored by the Ohio River Basin Alliance, National Wildlife Federation and University of Louisville’s Envirome Institute – proposes a regionwide roadmap to solve these problems. But their report says it will require “long-term, sustained funding and action” led by the U.S. government, which they say has the unique power and resources to coordinate a large-scale ecosystem restoration effort like this.
On a hot September afternoon, I toured the Garvin Brown Preserve in Prospect alongside members of River Fields, the nonprofit that manages the land.
Kristin Faurest, the nonprofit’s chief executive, said the preserve is “an example of the kind of place that this plan seeks to support and restore and nurture.”
The 46-acre property, which borders the Ohio River, was once a family farm. Now it’s growing wild, with forested areas as well as grass and wildflower meadows.
It’s also home to ecologically important wetlands and lies along an important migratory route for birds. In recent years, she said birders have documented more than 200 species of birds on the preserve.
If the new restoration plan succeeds in attracting more resources and federal funding for environmental efforts in the Ohio River Basin, Faurest said that could help nonprofits like hers that do smaller-scale conservation work.
Looking ahead, she sees the overall restoration plan as a legacy project for future generations.
“Maybe this won't be realized until my kids are 10, 15, 20 years older than they are now,” she said.
‘Living a little longer’
The restoration plan will also help the humans who live alongside the native wildlife and plants researchers want to protect.
“It’s hard to imagine that anything bad will happen by investing in restoring our ecology to a natural, more resilient state,” said Ted Smith, director of the Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil at the University of Louisville’s Envirome Institute.
With public health, Smith said people have understandably prioritized trying to eliminate deadly threats, like dangerous microbes in our water. A newer frontier for science is the study of how natural ecologies can benefit human health. That’s something the Envirome Institute focuses its efforts on.
Smith thinks there’s good reason to believe that restoring the health of the Ohio River and its tributaries will also improve the health of nearby communities.
He said that’s what’s exciting about the new restoration plan’s recommendations. Doing more to protect regional habitats will improve natural amenities that people value, like fishing and hiking opportunities, he said.
“But could we also get the benefit of actually living a little longer, with fewer diseases, lower cancer rates, better heart disease outcomes?” he asked. “I hope that we can have the imagination to see that this is a highly leveraged investment. It can have dividends in lots of columns.”
The restoration plan includes dozens of recommendations. They generally suggest four types of actions on environmental restoration:
- Make bigger federal investments in successful programs.
- Do more monitoring and research to inform and guide efforts.
- Increase coordination to holistically manage the region’s ecosystem.
- Provide more technical assistance for local communities.
One big goal is to restore much of the region’s natural hydrologic functioning – meaning, basically, the way water moves across the landscape.
Steps toward that larger aim include removing dams and reconnecting networks of streams that got disconnected as humans reshaped waterways to meet agricultural and industrial needs.
“It’s not that we want to – or can – necessarily go back to the conditions 200 [or] 400 years ago. I mean, that’s just not realistic,” said Jonathan Czuba, who contributed to the report and is an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Biological Systems Engineering. “But that's kind of the vision … getting somewhere closer to that.”
Czuba said many of the problems the restoration plan aims to tackle are interconnected, and so are the solutions. For example, protecting the Ohio River Basin’s dwindling amount of wetlands doesn’t just preserve an important habitat for regional wildlife. It also contributes to better water quality because wetlands act like a filter, as water slowly percolates through that soggy landscape before seeping into local streams and groundwater.
Battling invasives
Another key challenge addressed in the restoration plan is the fight against invasive species, like carp and zebra mussels, according to Brent Murry, an assistant professor of aquatic ecology at West Virginia University, who contributed to the report.
The plan’s recommendations include investing in early detection efforts to identify new invaders before they run rampant and choke out native species that are important to the ecosystem.
Otherwise, Murry said, “We don’t recognize them until somebody happens across them … At that point, then we’re moving towards containment – trying to restrict them from moving into new, uninvaded areas – and then suppression. We want to try to reduce their numbers so that they don’t have an ecological impact, social impact, economic impact.”
Preventive monitoring isn’t cheap. It costs a lot of money to send people out on boats to survey waterways and see if new invasive species are lurking in the depths.
But he said that’s a major point the restoration plan is making: Restoring the health of the Ohio River Basin’s waterways will require big investments, but the payoffs are worth it.
“These are things that are massively overlooked,” he said. “And particularly with invasive species, if we can prevent them from getting here or catch them early and eradicate them, we’re going to save so much money down the road.”
‘Complete transformation’
At the Garvin Brown Preserve in Prospect earlier this month, biologist and River Fields consultant Gina Bergner showed me the native vegetation they’re working to nurture, like ironweed and buttonbush, as well as the invasive plants they’re trying to root out.
She stopped to point out a particularly difficult type of invasive: Purple loosestrife.
“Each plant can produce about five million seeds,” she said. “Once it’s here, it’s very hard to control. It’s smart for River Fields to get on it early and hit it hard.”
Bergner has spent years walking this nature preserve, watching the conservation efforts progress.
“These wetlands are reforested,” she said, gesturing to one that’s partially obscured by a tangle of vegetation. “I mean literally, in about 20 years, I’ve seen this complete transformation.
“This was all hay,” she explained of the section where we’re standing. “Just the fact that the native plants have come back and taken over the hay fields, and now it’s pollinator fields. To me, it’s just like magic.”
