The Roanoke River: Adaptive Management

Roanoke River
© Mark Daniels

No project in North Carolina better exemplifies the Conservancy’s growth and adaptability than the Roanoke River. From a 176-acre preserve established in 1982, the Roanoke River project has blossomed to more than 90,000 acres, and now encompasses a National Wildlife Refuge, thousands of acres of publicly accessible game lands and a popular paddle trail, not to mention a project office and several conservancy preserves.

Over the years, the Conservancy has become the largest landowner in the Roanoke River Valley, working with everyone from local communities to hunt clubs to large corporations to ensure the protection of the largest and least disturbed bottomland hardwood ecosystem on the Atlantic Slope, home to rare plants, large mammals and more than 250 bird species.

“The simple fact is, land protection alone wasn’t enough,” says Dr. Sam Pearsall, the Conservancy’s Director of Science. “Upstream dams were releasing too much water over too long a period of time, and it was creating havoc with downstream natural communities.”

So the Conservancy engaged Dominion Generation, which operates two dams on the river, in conversation about changing their release patterns. And, because it was such a large landowner, the Conservancy earned a place at the table when the dams came up for federal re-licensing, a process each dam must periodically go through to continue operations. The result was an agreement between Dominion and the Conservancy to manage water flows differently and to use the results of an extensive monitoring program to tweak the release patterns as necessary.

“It’s called adaptive management,” says Pearsall. “What it really means is that we pay attention to the entire system, and if something isn’t working, we try to fix it.” On the Roanoke River, this approach has lead to a vibrant, healthy ecosystem with numerous stakeholders engaged in the landscape’s future.

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