Green Cover Best Management Practices: Riparian

• Riparian areas provide numerous environmental, economic and social benefits, including recharging aquifers, filtering nutrients and sediment from water, providing habitats for fish and wildlife, storing water, and minimizing erosion

• Information on the amount and range of forage production in riparian areas available to agricultural producers is limited.
• Understanding the capacity of riparian areas to produce forage and what factors affect that production will aid in more well-informed management decisions as part of a producer’s grazing plan.
• Riparian areas are only 2-5% of the landscape, but may be up to 4 times as productive as the associated upland.
• There is a high degree of variability in production between sites and years depending on site characteristics, flooding and management.

• The Iron Creek Watershed Improvement Society is the first stewardship group in central Alberta to monitor riparian health on a watershed basis.Riparian health inventories were initially conducted on 30 sites along Iron Creek in Flagstaff County in 2001 by Cows and Fish.
• Riparian health inventories were re-conducted on 29 of the 30 original sites in 2006.
• The overall riparian health score improved from 66.2% to 67.1% for the 29 polygons inventoried in 2001 and 2006 which rates the riparian areas as healthy (or functioning) but with problems.
• 23 Flagstaff County landowners participated in the riparian health monitoring project.
• Approximately 28 km of creek distance was assessed each year.

• Cows and Fish works with people to build the knowledge and skills necessary to ‘take the next step’, which is the application of improved and beneficial management practices. This step is about building ecological literacy and it goes along with the practical ‘farmer know how’ and local knowledge. The combination of these elements has produced many success stories on Alberta farms and in local watersheds.
• Sharing stories and key messages allows us to get the good news stories out, deliver effective riparian management tools, and create healthier landscapes. In my twenty minutes I will explain how digital stories are made and why they work.