Southeast Node Summary
January 2005
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Node Description
Researcher in the Southeast Node are Elizabeth Sudduth and Judy Meyer, Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
The Southeast Node includes Georgia, Kentucky, and North and South Carolina . There are 862 projects in the NRRSS database from the Southeast Node.
Figure 1: Breakdown of stream restoration projects in the Southeast by state.
Methods
Data Collection
Unlike some regions of the country, the Southeast has no large databases of stream restoration projects. Data sources for the Southeast included 17 smaller databases, 47 reports, and 45 webpages, as well as conference proceedings, articles from journals, newspapers, and newsletters, and personal communications.
Table 1: Major data sources for NRRSS Southeast Node
| Data Source | Number of Projects |
| North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund Database |
248 |
|
Kentucky 401 Mitigation Projects Database |
113 |
| NC Wetlands Restoration Program 2002 Annual Report |
75 |
| Ecological Function of Restored Stream Systems: Benthic Macroinvertebrates: Final Report for EPA Wetland Program Development Grant, Grant # CD984487-98 |
50 |
|
Georgia Stream Buffer Initiative Tracking Database |
29 |
| National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Grants |
24 |
| USACE Water Resource Development Acts |
17 |
|
Louisville-Jefferson County MSD Capital Projects |
17 |
|
USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife HABiTS database |
16 |
|
USEPA Grant Reporting and Tracking System |
16 |
| NC Department of Transportation Natural System Units Monitoring Reports |
15 |
|
The Nature Conservancy |
11 |
| North Carolina Stream Restoration Institute |
11 |
| Proceedings of the 2002 NC Stream Restoration Conference |
10 |
| Proceedings of the 2004 Southeastern Regional Conference on Stream Restoration |
9 |
| USACE Savannah District Approved Mitigation Banks in Georgia |
9 |
Phone Surveys
We are currently in the process of completing phone surveys with project managers throughout the Southeast. Projects for the surveys are randomly chosen from the subset of projects in our database completed 1996-2002 and done within the intent categories of Channel Reconfiguration, In-stream Habitat Improvement, Riparian Management, or Water Quality Management.
Results
Cost
The NRRSS database includes cost information for 47% of projects in the Southeast for a total cost in the database of $490 million, average cost of $1.2 million, and median cost of $400,000. We estimate the total cost for the NRRSS Southeast Node projects to be $1 billion.
Intent
In the Southeast Node, 150 projects (17%) have no intent indicated in the database and many projects have multiple intents.
Figure 2: Number of projects per intent in the Southeast.
Figure 3: Median cost of projects by intent category in the Southeast.
Monitoring
28% of projects indicated monitoring. The number of projects monitored varied greatly by state, with South and North Carolina having the highest rates of monitoring reported in the country (47% and 36%, respectively) and Georgia and Kentucky having rates more similar to the rest of the country (15% and 11 %, respectively). Preliminary results of our phone surveys suggest that the rates may actually be much higher throughout the Southeast.
Future Directions
One trend we noticed in the initial data collection was that many projects in the Southeast seem to be located in urban areas and many times those projects are much more expensive than in rural areas. We hope to examine this trend further using GIS analysis. The Southeast is unique in its diversity of aquatic biota, with some watersheds having unusually high rates of endemism among fishes and mussels. Another interesting issue to explore within the summary database would be whether stream restoration projects are more likely to be done in these "hotspots of biodiversity".
Both the summary database and the phone surveys show that the Southeast is unique in the amount of monitoring of stream restoration projects that is being done. We hope to examine further the types of monitoring and how those types relate to the expressed goals of stream restoration.
An example of a successful Riparian Management and Water Quality Improvement project in the Southeast. To learn more, visit our success stories at http://www.nrrss.umd.edu/Success_Stories/NRRSS_Success.htm
NRRSS work in the Southeast Node was supported by funding from the Charles S. Mott Foundation.
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