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Riparian area management moves to 'whole land' approach

More people than ever are discovering the value of riparian areas. Next step, say researchers, is enhancing that value.

When a group of researchers received Canada Alberta Beef Industry Development Fund (CABIDF) support six years ago to enhance the sustainability of riparian areas, they faced a substantial challenge: helping people understand what riparian areas are and why they are important in the first place.

Although many people, especially agricultural producers, are familiar with riparian areas — the green strips of vegetation commonly found around rivers, creeks, streams and other water bodies — far fewer people understand the benefits they present to water quality, cattle grazing and the environment in general.

However, that tide may be turning, with the term now less likely to incite blank stares and more likely to inspire interest, if not always action. Credit for this, at least in part, goes to the development and transfer of riparian research and tools through community educational efforts such as the "riparian health assessment field workbook," which helps producers quantify riparian area health, and a "classification system" to help identify the many different kinds of riparian areas.

This success, say researchers with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development (ASRD), an agency dedicated to sustainability and ecological balance on grasslands and forest rangelands in the province, marks the end of one chapter in the search for better understanding and management of riparian areas and the beginning of a new one based on a "whole land" approach which manages the entire landscape — including riparian areas - as a single functioning unit.

"We can continue to manage individual components and still be successful, but then we lose the opportunity to understand and manage grasslands on a 'whole land' basis that could help producers get the most value from the resource," says Gerry Ehlert, manager of the range resource management program for ASRD and research partner in the CABIDF project.

Adds Barry Adams, grasslands range management specialist and co-lead researcher on the CABIDF riparian area management project, "The reason we singled out riparian areas in the first place is because we wanted to communicate that these areas are unique, with different processes and functions from upland grasslands.

"But it's time to take things to the next level. We have come from a point of simply learning about riparian areas to actually applying that knowledge as quite a robust science. I foresee the day when any ranching operation worth its salt will have a digital base-map with the land divided into recognizable landscape units defined by soil and vegetation, complete with riparian classifications and health assessments."

A crash course

The benefits of riparian areas are vast. Some of the key ecological functions they perform include recharging aquifers, building and maintaining banks and shores, storing water, energy and carbon, filtering and buffering water and maintaining biodiversity. That range of activity alone offers significant benefits to livestock operations, but healthy riparian areas also present a substantial value for the grazing of livestock.

"When you talk about forage production in the upland areas of the province — the forest and grasslands — you talk in terms of pounds per acre," says Ehlert. "By comparison, healthy riparian areas have the potential to produce many tonnes of forage per acre and produce many other benefits to society and the environment."

New tools for farmers

In 2000, CABIDF funded a research project intended to find new tools to enhance and renew the health of riparian areas around lakes, sloughs and wetlands. The research team was a partnership between ASRD, Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development (AAFRD) and Cows and Fish, an organization dedicated to the management of riparian habitats in Alberta.

This present partnership resulted in the development of two important and popular tools. One was a health assessment field workbook for riparian areas in standing water systems such as lakes, sloughs and potholes, and a classification system to help identify the many different kinds of riparian areas found in the northern parkland and forests.

In a previous CABIDF-supported project, a field workbook was designed for examining riparian health along streams, creeks and rivers. In addition, a riparian classification system was developed for Alberta's grassland region. "Together, these workbooks and classification systems help farmers, ranchers and other landowners easily measure the ability of a riparian area to perform key ecological functions," says Ehlert.

The health assessment workbooks have proven popular, with around 15,000 copies used as resources over the past few years - enough to warrant a reprint, says Norine Ambrose, project manager for Cows and Fish. Because the riparian classification documents are technical documents, Adams and Ambrose say the numbers in use are much lower than the field workbooks. However, they are still being actively used in riparian inventory and assessment.

But even these statistics do not tell the whole story behind the agricultural community's knowledge of riparian areas, says Adams. "No livestock producer who has been to one of our workshops ever looks at a riparian area in the same way again. They get a chance to see the real value they bring to their operations."

Answering a call to action does not always follow knowledge and concern, however — at least not immediately. "It takes a long time for people to develop the necessary skill and knowledge base to fit these management practices into their operations," says Ambrose. "It's a patient person's business."

At the same time, knowledge of riparian areas has expanded beyond the agricultural community into cohorts less economically and philosophically connected to the land. The exodus of urban people to small rural acreages, for example, has driven an interest in riparian area management. And from the recreational point of view of, for example, permanent and seasonal lakeshore residents, the interest has developed at more fundamental levels as well.

"Water quality and quantity issues have driven a lot of urban interest in riparian areas," says Ambrose. "Although we still have a long way to go, it's encouraging to see urban centres working with the agricultural community to come to management solutions that are mutually beneficial to the environment and themselves."

Towards a whole land strategy

If the demographics concerned with riparian area health are expanding, so too is the research community's approach to their management. Philosophically integrating riparian areas into one broader landscape could be the key to a whole new way to manage the land, says Ehlert.

"A typical pasture being grazed by livestock is home to all kinds of plant communities - riparian, native grassland, tame pasture, forests, you name it. One piece of that landscape puzzle affects the other pieces of that puzzle and so on. It's like the human body; parts of it we've known about for some time while other parts we're just beginning to understand. If we want to maintain human health as individuals and communities, we have to manage it on an integrated basis. Land management is no different."

Adds Ambrose, "The key is getting people to think functionally about a landscape that provides products and services to harvest but at the same time performs ecologically. If we don't have the landscape performing ecologically, we're not going to have the things that piece of landscape can produce. We need the pieces of the landscape working together."

Future growth

Ehlert, Adams and Ambrose are all encouraged by the developments in the field of riparian area management and expect increasing numbers of people with all manner of agendas waving the flag for improved riparian health.

Ongoing education and awareness will play a role in driving this, says Ehlert. "We are in the process of developing an exciting new project with the federal Greencover Canada initiative and Cows and Fish that will involve whole land based introductory and intermediate range management courses for livestock producers, government staff and other stakeholders. It will include all of the upland and riparian management tools — it's something new and different."

More information on the players in riparian area management in Alberta is available on the Web. For further details on Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, visit the ASRD Web site at www.srd.gov.ab.ca. More information on the Cows and Fish program is available at www.cowsandfish.org.

The development of new tools for riparian health was one of the projects supported by the $16.4 million Canada Alberta Beef Industry Development Fund (CABIDF), a partnership between the federal and provincial government dedicated to market-neutral industry development in the beef sector. Information on all CABIDF projects is available at www.albertabeef.org/cabidf/index.html.

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