Read the video transcript

• Restoring Wet Meadows in Montana's Sagebrush Sea

  Sean Claffey, Conservation Coordinator, Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership: 

  Across southwest Montana, you'll find these wet meadows out in the sagebrush. These green ribbons of high-quality habitat support all wildlife from elk and pronghorn down to your smallest little songbirds coming down, also foraging on insects. They also provide important forage for livestock.

  Historically, snowmelt or heavy rainfall would spread out across that whole meadow surface, trickling through, allowing it to soak into the soils. Ultimately, more water in our soils is more water available later in the season.

  What we see now everywhere is channelized flow, these vertical drops where erosion is happening, and you get a lowering of the water table and a drying out of that whole meadow surface. Without the water to maintain that vegetation that we call a meadow, a wet meadow, that that meadow is lost.

  The scale of this problem is huge. We need a solution that we can scale up to match the problem.

  Kelly Bockting, Bureau of Land Management:

  So what we're doing today is building in-stream structures, basically to slow down the flow primarily during spring runoff events, capture water and back it up, recharge groundwater, and basically help rebuild some of the stream banks and keep these wet meadows, greener longer throughout the season for wildlife habitat.

  Sean Claffey, Conservation Coordinator, Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership: 

  The beauty of these things is you don't need a degree. You don't need heavy equipment. Really, anyone can learn to build these structures in a day or less.

  Kelly Bockting: 

  And when you're limited on personnel, having these partnerships makes it more efficient as far as how fast we're able to get projects done on the ground, and how many projects we’re able to get done on the ground.

  Sean Claffey:

  This particular project here was built by the Youth Employment Program last summer. In just two and a half days, they installed over 75 structures all by hand.

  Here's one of the structures we installed. It's kicking flow out of the bank, out of the channel, over the top of this meadow surface again. All these soils have an opportunity to soak in that water and hold it. 

  This channel was up to two feet deep in places. What we're looking at here is a structure we put in to lift that water surface up and spread flow back out over this meadow surface. So what was captured in the channel – there’s the original channel, or where water was captured before – is now out of bank and saturating a much wider surface here.

  I mean, we probably have 6 to 10 times more wetted area through this meadow. And this is our first runoff, our first year.

  If we could do that throughout the whole watershed, what does that mean for water storage and late-season returns throughout a whole drainage or a whole basin?

  Kelly Bockting:

  It's really cool to see that we can benefit this for generations to come. That's what it's all about.