Webinar

H2O'Lyon Webinar #13 // Joe Wheaton

On The May 25, 2023

5pm (Paris time)
Webinar in English with simultaneous translation into French

Low Tech Process Based Restoration of Riverscapes - How to make our river great again in Europe!

This webinar co-organised with Réseaux Rivières TV is designed to students, practitioners and researchers.

Speaker :
Joe Wheaton, Professor, Utah State University (USA). Joe is hosted at the EVS laboratory from September 2022 to June 2023 and supported by the graduate school H2O'Lyon

Low Tech Process Based Restoration of Riverscapes - How to make our river great again in Europe!

Riverscapes are the part of the landscape that could plausibly flood in the contemporary natural flow regime. They include the potential floodplain and channels. Riverscapes are amongst the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and are crucial to our survival. One of the most widespread impacts to these riverscapes is the starvation of structures like wood and beaver dams that were once pervasive in these landscapes.
Process based restoration seeks to improve the health of riverscapes by promoting natural processes like floods to do the work of restoration and sustaining healthy, dynamic systems.
Low tech methods use simple, hand built structures and additions of material to the riverscape.
This webinar will introduce how low tech process based restoration is used to initially mimic, quickly promote, and eventually sustain the key processes of beaver dam activity and/or wood accumulation in riverscapes.
Examples from the US will be shared, but discussion will focus on where and how such approaches can and are taking place in Europe. Examples will include post assisted log structures or PALS, beaver dam analogues or BDAs, beaver translocation and grazing management. Some of the early examples of projects in the US will be shared to help emphasize which situations different mixes of low tech techniques can be applied. Some unifying principles will be shared to help guide where such activities are attempted


Joe Wheaton is a Professor of Riverscapes at Utah State University's Watershed Science Department.
He co-founded the Restoration Consortium at Utah State University, the international
Riverscapes Consortium, and has worked since 2000 in riverscape restoration as both a researcher and practitioner.
He is the lead author of the
Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration of Riverscapes Design Manual and a principle and co-founder of a design-build restoration firm, Anabranch Solutions.
More about Joe...



The lecture is co-organised with Réseaux Rivières TV.

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