eightmile creek stream restoration

Eightmile Creek Stream Restoration

Program

Give Back to the Yellowstone

Watershed

Upper Yellowstone

Montana Freshwater Partners is developing a stream restoration project on Eightmile Creek in partnership with Eightmile Ranch in the Paradise Valley south of Livingston. Eightmile Creek is a direct tributary to the Yellowstone River, originating in the Gallatin Mountains and draining an approximately 42-square-mile watershed. Eightmile Creek is a relatively steep, high-stream-power system that has become mostly confined to a single-thread channel and lacks a healthy riparian corridor.

Restoration Techniques

Log Jam Structures

Floodplain Reconnection

Riparian Revegetation

The project reach has a long history of intensive grazing pressure on streambanks, dewatering, and beaver removal, which together have greatly reduced woody riparian vegetation (cottonwoods, willows, and other deciduous shrubs) along the creek. This loss of riparian vegetation has resulted in an oversimplified, over-widened, moderately steep channel lacking bedform diversity. While a few mature cottonwoods persist along the channel, new recruitment has been heavily limited by browse (cattle, deer, and elk); willows are almost completely absent; and juniper encroachment throughout the floodplain and surrounding uplands has further shifted riparian and upland habitats away from historical condition. These changes have reduced large wood recruitment and simplified in-stream habitat, and the channel now functions largely as one continuous riffle with very few pools, limiting habitat complexity and quality for fish and wildlife.

The purpose of the proposed project is to enhance instream habitat and expand riparian vegetation to support a diversity of aquatic, riparian, and upland vegetation, fish, and wildlife species. This will be accomplished through process-based restoration techniques designed to expand the active area through which Eightmile Creek meanders, maximizing the complexity, health, and extent of the riverscape; including increasing floodplain connectivity, increasing bedform diversity (pools, riffles, and other habitat features), expanding wetland extent along the channel, and increasing cover of native riparian vegetation, particularly cottonwoods and willows.