How Plants Are Bringing Rivers Back 

This is cool, back in 2006-7, I took a class in Landscaping with Native Plants, and then had a paid internship doing exactly what is described here. We planted hundreds of Native trees and shrubs along 5 East Tennessee waterways, usually within parks, where the entire Native flora had been removed. Today, most of those plants we place are thriving, giving wildlife a second chance, and helping preserve the local ecosystems.

In Brazilian Portuguese, the technical term for those buffer forests is "mata ciliar", which means "eyelash forest", because they protect the river like eyelashes protect our eyes.

Here in Quebec City, we used to have a river here that used to be like that, a around 10 years back they ripped the concrete everywhere and created a natural like environment around it and a buffer, its helping a lot to restore the river's quality. Turned it into a linear park for people to visit it, great spot now. Used to be a stinky ditch full of pollution.

I work with an environmental consulting company doing just this. I love that restoring native plant communities to protect river systems is becoming so much more widespread. The rivers need it!

Doing this in California is especially important as it helps keep the water colder. Salmon need cold water to thrive, and they are a keystone species.

Even imagining the LA river with huge riparian buffers is such a great piece of imagery. I hope they can make it happen!

We just spend over 60k this past fortnight planting a native buffer along the stream that runs through our dairy farm. It's been so cool. And there has been a digger here the past few days sorting out sediment traps at both the entrance and exit on the farm aswell as in the middle so that ducks have a place to rest and any sedinemt can drop down keeping the water clear.

I'm loving these plant focused videos! Please consider doing one on permaculture and regenerative agriculture!

Here in Solingen, Germany it always seemed strange to me how every little stream in every little valley in the city has its own little path of forest around it, now it seems pretty logical. Also it's pretty awesome to just walk a few meters from the next big street and basically stand in a little nature reserve where you don't even notice just a few meters up the hill you got a whole city again.

As an environmental biologist I want to say thank you. For my entire career I have been trying to do my best in educating the importance of a riparian zone, I will continue to do so, but am super appreciative that you published this.

Concretes actually make the flooding worse. No place for the water to get absorbed to the ground. Natural river deltas with sufficient plants to act as sponge likely to better control flood. Rivers tend to have numerous dry parallel channels to direct flood water. Ox bow lakes and such. Combined with beavers digging channels and deepening the bottoms, pre-human rivers must have hold much more water.

Fantastic job summarizing river restoration and riparian buffers! Thanks Hank! This is literally what I studied in school. I think I'll just show people this video when they ask me what ecosystem restoration is all about or what I studied.

One of the oddest experiences I ever had was in central California. The riverbed was concrete. In my area, we don’t have concrete rivers (or rivers at all really). Walking into the river was so odd because you could only feel the abrasive mess of the concrete instead of the soft and malleable dirt of most natural rivers.

I have been letting my backyard fill with native plants to create a pollinators garden. We are not right next to the water, but there is a large marsh and river system near by. The native flowers are having a big effect on the marsh and there are more plants and birds here than before

I was wondering when you guys would cover this on sci show. I found out about this when I ran into some people while backing that do this by buying out land from farmers in Oregon. This is a really cool project and I am so glad you brought attention to this!

No joke, when I did my internship in college back in 2012, I did a lot of work helping to map out where riperian buffers might be able to go (I did my internship at a watershed advocacy organization). So these things have a special place in my heart.

It also prevents rivers drying up. Having the land saturated because it under tree cover means the river doesnt leach into the surrounding land. And the leaf litter feeds insects which feed fish, keeping their populations healthy.

I grew up with a riparian buffer on my farm as a kid. Loved playing in those woods by the creek. Just never knew that was the proper term for it.

You know, you see these kinds of buffers almost everywhere but you never actually think about how beneficial they are!

Willow trees are just amazing at this job, at least in more northern countries. They might have a huge detriment that i do not know of. But for just absorbing human made pollutants and helping clean what goes into rivers, they are pretty great. They grow fast, and provide fair wind shelter. So you do not get so much wind erosion. Boy do i like them. :P

Don’t forget about erosion control too! The roots of the plants help hold the soil and sediment along the river to lessen the amount of erosion that occurs.

Yes! The Boise River Park system is a great example of how beneficial this is to everyone

Great video! The Yellowstone wolves helped to rehabilitate the riparian buffer in Yellowstone Nat'l. Park. Short-Long Explanation: Wolves scared deer congregating at the water, so the new trees and shubs could grow again, so small mammals had more coverage and returned, so larger predators had more food. The berries provided more food for other animals, great and small, like bears. The beavers now had more vegetation to build their dams, and the ponds created more opportunities for other life...and stopped/slowed the meandering of the river.

Yeah, more Hazel Nuts means more Nutella. I am down for this.

the san antonio river is a great example of an ecosystem restoration project that both improved habitat quality and continued to prevent massive flooding in the area! the whole project is called the san antonio river improvements project, and it was one of the largest (if not the largest) urban river restorations in the usa. it’s been so awesome to see the return of so many native species now that their habitat has been restored!

You missed their biggest benefit. They prevent EROSION. The root systems of the trees in the buffer hold the soil together.

In the early 2010s, Columbus, Ohio removed a lot of the low-head dams and channelization of the Scioto River in the downtown area. A buffer was created on either side of the river; the east bank becoming a park called "the Scioto Mile" with walking paths, and west bank providing a lush, broad lawn for the city's science museum, COSI, that looks towards the downtown core with the state supreme court building one of the prominent landmarks. It's been a part of riparian restoration efforts in the city, especially along the two main rivers (the Olentangy being the other), that date back to at least the mid 1990s. And the city is always looking to improve further on these efforts.

This is probably the first time I've heard the word "riparian" since Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet!) invited her friends to a waterside supper with riparian entertainment.

plants: we're bringing rivers back YEAH

In most cases (with some exceptions, of course) the first 10-15m from the water's edge aren't worth cultivating anyway, because ground surface irregularities make mechanized agricultural work impractically slow and may even damage expansive equipment. And there's another benefit of letting a tree line grow in such areas: it slows down the wind near ground level, keeping more snow piled up on the field during winter and reducing surface erosion during spring and early summer when cultivated plants are still too small to anchor the plowed/softened top soil. In my area farmers are planting tree lines alongside small streams and ditches as well for this reason, in the long run benefits outweigh the cumulative loss of a few hectares that were most difficult to cultivate anyway.

When I was in university studying recreation and leisure, I had to take an outdoor recreation course. The study we read showed that when the conservationists re-introducer a certain animal back into the forested area, I believe it was a fox or wolf, any things became better in that areas ecosystem. The river in the area flowed more like it did in the past, the actual course or the river changed, and the wildlife became more in balance.

So awesome they are making more rivers to help ecosystems again~°•°•

Buffers in ecosystems are often neglected as we fail to pin point their clear use, and videos like this surely shed light on how systems are protected by buffers and ensuring enough space in between systems for buffers to do their job. Thank you Sci show for your dedication to enlightenment !

I chuckled when the BBC Earth project name "Our Green Planet" came on the screen. Hank and John Green taking over the world!!!

I’ve come to realize my whole belief system is based around the idea that biodiversity is important. That’s my new religion: Biodiversity.

I hope more and more people start getting things like this. it doesn't have to even be "green" plants or trees. it could be arid plants, dry shrubs, etc. edit: also, first comment, woo!

Thank you for the knowledge.

Next time I'm at a river, I will admire it's riparian buffer

I'm glad people are talking about these issues!

I'm lucky enough to have a stream running through one side of my garden, which already came with a nicely established riparian zone. Over the years, I have been improving and extending this zone further into my garden, which is a project of soil rebuilding, rewilding with permaculture. * For anyone who wants to rebuild exhausted and thin soils naturally (which is great for carbon capture) without incurring the dangers of importing non-local soil into the area, do look into incorporating fungi species as a great way to speed the process along. Once I managed to establish just a couple of fungi species (not that easy, as they can be a bit slow and fussy to begin with if you have extremely thin soil), the process of soil recovery and building becomes much easier. It's been my experience that some fungi species appear to work in close union with others for even better results. For instance, I managed to get Birch Bolete to settle in the garden, and this then allowed the quick establishment of Fly Agaric. The quality of the soil in this area improved at once. Now these 2 are firm friends, it's my belief their presence will make it easier to introduce other species of Boletes, which are excellent as a food resource for my family and for feeding various wildlife (red squirrels like to pick the caps and dry them out high in tree branches for their winter larder). A tree which I favour most for growing alongside my stream (and planning to plant along the riverside further down the valley) is Hazel. Being smaller and not very compact, it doesn't crowd out too much light, allowing a ground level layer of plants to grow underneath. It produces valuable food for wildlife and humans alike (I take the harvest from lower branches and the wildlife help themselves to everything above arm's reach). I'm planning to make plant milk, cream, ice cream and biscuit flour from the 7 litres of hazelnut kernels I collected this Autumn. Hazels can be coppiced to keep them young and vigorous, the removed branches good for kindling, making activated charcoal for soil building, and for making rustic fencing to protect more delicate trees. I will stack excess cut thin stuff in heaps so that animals can hibernate in safety (toads just love places like this, but I'm sure others make good use of them too).

As an aspiring restoration ecologist, this video was really fun and interesting to watch!

What a lovely little positive thought for the first video of the day 😊.

Watching river restoration and dam removal videos on YT is a balm to this weary soul

I live right next to the green river! I used to float down it in an inner tube in the summer

We have a plant buffer around most of the “runs” or creeks in Baltimore.

When Aotearoa New Zealand changed over a lot of grazing land from sheep to cows (because milk exports make more money), nitrogen runoff from larger cow pats polluted many rivers in the country. Efforts like these are needed to get the rivers back to health, but I’m not sure how much has actually been done.

Thanks for sharing this knowledge

Love this kind of informative video

I have no idea why anyone would want that footage of them spraying out in the wild. Even the air induction nozzles we use for fungicide don't fog like that. And the track lines have me foxed as well.

Fantastic clip!

In some cases there is an undo button, albeit an expensive one. In Florida, the Kissimmee River was turned into a canal for flood control. This had a lot of negative consequences on Lake Okeechobee and other places downstream, particularly due to agricultural runoff. The Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, which originally built the canal, are now undoing most of it, restoring the original channel (which in many cases had been left in place) and pushing the levees (which are simply the spoil from digging the canal piled on either side) back into the enormous ditch from which it came a few decades ago.

Something worth noting is that many of these riparian corridors occur naturally along rivers. However, humans modify its surroundings or change the natural flow to a concrete flow, effectively damaging or removing the riparian vegetation entirely. Once again, a reminder that if humans could leave nature alone, things would be just fine haha

Normal river: Plant buffer Riven Ganges: Sh*t buffer

I used to hike around the forests in Northern California when I was a child in the 60's and 70's. There was dense brush everywhere and all of it dripping with moisture condensate. Now I see they have cleared out all the dense brush to prevent fires but everything is hot, bare and dry without it. Plants keep recycling the water among themselves like sponges. I don't think they are getting it right.

really nice video !

Excellent video😊👍

Vermejo Park Ranch, west of Raton, New Mexico, USA, is doing some wonderful rewilding of its river, by building exclosures for a few years to allow native plants to reestablish and mature.

In a couple weeks I'm actually gonna be helping with one of these. We are going to be planting trees along the banks of the elkhead creek in moffat county to help with erosion of the banks and to help keep the water cooler.

I'm working hard on my IL farm to get rid of invasive plants and plant native. I'm adding lots of grass areas and border strips. The problem is all the fields are tiled. Therefore, the chemicals don't go through the buffer zones. The tiled field usually ends near a water source. Much of mine goes into a stream that goes into my pond that flows to a river. I fight algae endlessly in my pond. My farmer wants more tile. It's often too wet in spots during planting season. Hopefully, in the long run we continue to add more native ways that are a win/win.

Love the shirt!

this literally bumps up my hope in humanity/biosphere among all the worsening news of climate/nuclear risks

Cool. Thank you

Most of the rivers and streams here in Kansas are surrounded by woodlands. Not due to any gardening efforts, but because you can't farm slopes and flood areas. Although contrary to popular belief, there's actually more forests around here now than two hundred years ago because it was all open plains when the Americans got here and they planted trees.

Thank you

The Green River foliage has also allowed for the easier movement of serial killers in the Pudget Sound area.

This channel is totally awesome and so is Hank! 😃💖

amazing video.

I really like this solution

Whoever approved the N2O shown at 3:05 needs to come to the office more...

Was there any Chevys at the removed Levy?

New most of this already but the particular adaptation is interesting.

3:00 Wouldn't the Nitrogen be converted to N20 eventually anyway as soon as it finds a plant (eg algae) downstream?

Taking land away from people's farmland is often a difficult sell. But in many parts of Europe that is being solved by installing bicycle highways along these riparian areas. On a bicycle path like that you will only ever encounter a car at a crossing, but never on the road itself. Allowing for vastly more safe and comfortable cycling. Plus you are cycling through a beautiful piece of nature!

Nice microcosmos merch 👀

that's a fun shirt, hank

Go Go Sci Show

3:06 That's also a funny gas.

It would be great to have an interview or some collaboration with David Attenborough in the channel.

Great job environmentalist. 🤩🥳

Ironic timing, I just took a photo of a river in the town I grew up in where they reworked it to be more natural and its starting to look amazing. I mean, it's a couple of miles of a small river in a Chicago suburb, so it's not going to do A LOT for the environment, but it's cool they're doing it anyway.

Thanks for the video with the decent sponsor. Please no more carbon offset scams.

Inspiring! Thank you

They should apply permaculture ideas with Riparian buffers to make the land and water useful for both nature and men.

Can we make a solar net that can made electricity. To sade my graden and make some electricity or translucent solar panels that i can make a green house out of?

Best video ever! Thanks. Here in Germany, they have an unfortunate tendency to - I exaggerate a little - protect every industrial accident and preserve things that are at the wrong place. Meadows are nice, but rivers need trees. I hope these fools, who protect every meadow whereever it is, listen more to you than to experts here.

I lived in a shack on the la River in Universal city

Nature is surprising in how fast it will move back in when we let it. Remedial works on almost any scale makes a big difference. Life, uh, finds a way of course.

What about the fact that a lot of trees between river and an embankment cause the river to rise and in a case of a sudden heavy rainfall that could be a major reason of a flood or embankment breakage!?

I think we need more of these to save the planet

That was well done, informative and entertaining without being pushy or insulting my intelligence. I rarely sit all the way through any video but I did this one Thank you

There was a river in LA ?

What about flood protection? I either missed that or did not understood.

That's easy question, they kill orcs lock wizard in tower, and destroy the damn, while epic music plays in the background

How does the change in nitrogen content in river water affect the crops being grown with the water

I’m really glad that we as a species are finally realizing that nature isn’t something to be enslaved, but so,etching to be respected and worked with in an equal partnership

We need more trees y'all

So planting trees has a ripple effect down the stream through the entire ecosystem? Is that called Trickle-down-ecology ?

Where can i get that shirt he is wearing?!?

Neat