Dix River Tributaries and Wetlands Restoration

When the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet needed wetland and stream mitigation credits to compensate for unavoidable impacts to surface waters, they hired Wetland Studies and Solutions staff, contracted through the University of Louisville, to transform a large agricultural field with several drainage ditches into a diverse wetland and stream habitat.

The Challenge

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet provided our team a large fallow agricultural field with over 6,000 linear feet of drainage ditches into stream and wetland habitat. We were tasked with establishing a robust wetland and stream ecosystem to meet compensation needs and provide ecological uplift.

Our Solution

WSSI staff provided careful assessment of the site and its opportunities and created a comprehensive design and restoration plan that produced 1.8 miles of stream restoration and 54 acres of wetlands. Drainage ditches were transformed into intermittent and ephemeral streams, and forested, scrub/shrub, and wet meadow wetlands were established, remediated, or enhanced in the former fields. The result is an ecosystem with diverse hydrologic conditions that support the functions of multiple aquatic habitats, including backwater channels, abandoned oxbow channels, emergent wetlands, and bottomland hardwood swamps.

We designed a restoration plan that altered surface and subsurface hydrology across the site to increase groundwater levels and reduce surface runoff rates. Our restoration plan called for filling the existing drainage ditches and removing 5,000 linear feet of drain tiles. A new floodplain for each tributary increased groundwater storage potential and channels were constructed using riffle-pool and step-pool morphology. We placed logs and large woody debris in the channels to increase habitat diversity.