Friday, September 12, 2003

New from ENN,

Friday, September 12, 2003
By Alexandra Amonette

It's January in central Mississippi's Yazoo Basin. Clambering along the eroding banks of a stream, members of a team of field workers and scientists from a small Montana company carefully plant willow and sycamore cuttings.

The dormant cuttings are harvested from a nearby sandbar and planted before the spring rains raise the stream's water level. Some of the cuttings are bundled together and anchored near the water's edge. Farther downstream, the team positions reinforced-fiber mats over the fine, crumbling soil and then anchors the mats with more live stakes.

The half-mile project is an effort to demonstrate new eco-friendly techniques for bank stabilization and river restoration instead of using rock and concrete, or "hard armor.

Trout Headwaters Inc. (THI), based in Livingston, Mont., has partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) to demonstrate the effectiveness of these new techniques across highly varied river systems before they are applied nationally and internationally. With plenty of streams in need of restoration, the backyard research area for the Corps' Waterways Experiment Station in the Yazoo Basin is...(Read on in: River restoration gets greener)

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