Improving Your Drinking Water using Best Management Practices
Stream Restoration
The Berks Conservancy is busy everyday working to improve all of our watersheds in Berks County. What does this mean to you? Clean, healthy water. Our restoration work aims to improve the quality of the water in our streams and drinking reservoirs for people and wildlife.
Our restoration projects involve stream bank fencing, riparian buffer establishment, and aquatic habitat improvement projects. Just as we support open space and agriculture, we also support the implementation of agricultural best management practices (BMP’s) that help restore the stream banks and improve aquatic habitat and water quality.
Stream bank fencing: This best management practice limits cattle access to the stream to protected crossings and drinking stations, preventing the cattle from eroding stream banks and degrading water quality.
Planting native trees and shrubs (establishing a riparian buffer): Planting native trees and shrubs along the stream banks help to stabilize the banks to prevent erosion and sedimentation. They also act as a buffer - filtering and catching runoff, provide shade to control stream temperature, and provide cover and food for aquatic wildlife, species diversity, and wildlife habitat.
Aquatic habitat improvement: A featureless stream provides poor aquatic habitat conditions. Installing in-stream boulders and rock structures such as rock veins, cross veins, and weirs, creates: sinuosity, pools, riffles, and both scouring and deposition effects to significantly improve aquatic habitat.
Wetland and Invasive Species Management:
The functioning of a wetland relies on all the native plants, animals, and microbes that reside there. When wetlands are disturbed, invasive plants that are not native to the area begin to take over and degrade the wetland. The Berks Conservancy manages numerous wetland sites in Berks County to remove and control invasive species for the benefit of the functioning wetlands, and for proper habitat for endangered species.
Wetlands are just one of the transition phases in nature’s cycle. Unfortunately, the natural process has been compromised due to development and degradation - wetlands are steadily declining in this region of Pennsylvania. In an attempt to simulate nature, we have employed the following management techniques:
Grazing: Rather than broadcasting chemicals to rid the wetland of aggressive invasive plant species, such as reed canary grass and phragmites, cattle grazing serves as a management tool to reduce woody and invasive plants, restore wetland environmental function and improve endangered species habitat.
Controlling woody vegetation: Cutting or girdling and treating woody vegetation, such as red maple, reverses succession and improves endangered species habitat.
Invasive species management on lythrum and multiflora rose: localized herbicide treatment on each individual plant is used as a management method for treating invasive species.
