Maintenance and Stewardship - Project Planning and Management for Ecological Restoration - page 179

Box 11-2. Lesson Learned: An Episodic Natural Event Can Be a Good Thing
A riparian corridor restoration project was installed on a floodplain a considerable
distance from a creek. To ensure the survival of the riparian plantings, an extensive
irrigation system was installed to bring water to each plant installed. Although the
plantings would be watered only during the dry summer and early fall for the first
three years, the expense was justified because failure was not an option. The following
winter, the floodplain was inundated for several days—enough to saturate the entire
soil profile. The flood also wiped out all of the irrigation lines, large and small.
Faced with a difficult decision as to whether to replace the irrigation system, the
project manager decided to wait and see how the plants did without irrigation in the
early part of the next summer. By early summer, the plants still looked healthy and
continued to thrive the rest of that summer and fall. Excavating a few root systems al-
lowed the project manager to determine that the root systems had grown deep enough
to be in contact with the groundwater table. The decision was made to not replace the
irrigation system and save money.
The project manager learned to adapt to current conditions not anticipated. By
taking a wait-and-see approach, in some cases it may be possible to prevent cost over-
runs caused by natural events.
FIGURE 11-1. A Konik horse, a small primitive horse from Poland, is used here as a means to control biomass
in one of the marsh tracts at Hickling Nature Centre marshlands, in England. (Photo by John Rieger.)