Restoration Webinar Series: Restoring Fish Passage While Maintaining a Historic Mill Pond
Learn about a restoration project along Maryland's Bishopville Stream that provided some of the fish passage benefits of an open stream while maintaining a popular historic mill pond.
About
Considering the potentially detrimental effects of Maryland's estimated 500 dams on fish populations, innovative techniques to mitigate these impacts are needed. In some cases, however, the dams hold historical or cultural value to local communities. Located along Maryland's Atlantic Coast, the Bishopville Stream Corridor Enhancement Project presented an approach to provide some of the benefits of an open stream while maintaining a historic mill pond.
The Bishopville Stream project consisted of modifying a popular but aging mill dam to create a nature-like fish passageway, with goals to remove the dam while maintaining the existing pond and to create fish passage using regenerative stream channel techniques. The 85-foot long, 4-foot high steel dam was removed and replaced with a series of six gentle, sloping rock riffles consisting of boulders, cobble, and clean fill that slow stream velocity and create resting areas for fish navigating upstream. Since the project was completed in 2014, anadromous fish including alewife, white perch, and gizzard shad have successfully moved upstream during subsequent spawning runs.
This webinar will provide a description of project construction and details on regenerative stream channel techniques. This technique is applicable to situations where pond habitat needs to be maintained concurrent with fish passage.
About the Restoration Webinar Series
The Restoration Webinar Series, hosted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is a venue for disseminating new approaches, best management practices and innovative restoration techniques to some of our nation’s greatest restoration challenges. The series covers a broad spectrum of topics including: planning and implementing restoration projects; project monitoring and evaluation at multiple time scales; accounting for a changing climate in restoration; regional restoration planning and priority setting; and permitting.