In praise of buttonbush for river restoration.

Jun 28, 2010

Imagine it’s March, late in the season for planting rooted seedling trees in the Midwest.  You see hundreds of  #2 pencil-sized twigs, each with a few pitiful roots on one end, laying in the sun on a stream restoration site in suburban St. Louis.  It’s...

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Missouri’s Current River.

Jun 21, 2010

I’m always surprised how few geomorph types know the Current River in the Missouri Ozarks. Kate and I are finishing a short working trip there. This photo shows me with a project I designed in 1994 at Big Spring. This National Park Service site has a rich...

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Huge floodplain restoration project in northern Louisiana

Jun 23, 2009

The New York Times ran a nice article this week on a groundbreaking floodplain restoration project in northern Lousiana. The US Fish and Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy are restoring a 25 square mile patch of floodplain along the Ouachita River. The area was...

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Saving trees in an incised urban stream.

Apr 24, 2009

Cara and I spent a couple of days doing a geomorphic analysis of an urban stream in O’Fallon, Missouri (just west of St. Louis) last week. This one is deeply incised into a Missouri River Pleistocene terrace and is threatening some houses. But is has one thing...

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A nice summary of pseudoscientific thinking.

Apr 6, 2009

A very well done video essay on the nature of scientific inquiry, open-mindedness, beliefs, and pseudoscience. A lot of stream restoration is based on poorly-examined premise. Those assumptions often masquerade as science when public money is used. These assumptions...

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