Little Muskingum River tree planting creates new life in Wingett Run watershed

By: Abby Neff, AmeriCorps VISTA

On Saturday, April 20, volunteers will travel to a site within the Wayne National Forest along the Little Muskingum River to plant trees that will support species and their habitats in the Wingett Run watershed.

The trees planted during this event will contribute to the overall planting of 5,250 trees and shrubs by Rural Action volunteers and Williams Forestry and Associates, a tree planting contractor. Matt Ledford is the Water Quality Specialist on the Watersheds team at Rural Action and is one of many people supporting the restoration of Wingett Run.

“The Wayne National Forest has priority river corridors and watershed condition classifications that we’ve been working on for a couple of years, and they had some priority projects in an area outside of Marietta called the Wingett Run Watershed, which is along the Little Muskingum River,” Ledford says.

In order to get funding for the projects, the team had to write a nine-element nonpoint source implementation strategy, or NPS-IS, is a “living strategic planning document” requested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that not only identifies problem areas within a watershed, but establishes objectives to address causes and sources of impairment while also detailing projects that will meet those goals.

Hannah Kopp (Dusty), the Watershed Program Manager at Rural Action, led the effort in writing the NPS-IS plan for Wingett Run in 2022.

“[In] Wingett Run, some impairments were bacteria and sedimentation,” Kopp says. “The sources of these, for example, bacteria would be agricultural runoff or failing home septic systems, and sedimentation would be the lack of a riparian buffer.”

A riparian buffer is a habitat along a stream where trees shade the water, making it cool enough for aquatic life to thrive. The trees and shrubs will deposit woody debris from old trees falling into the stream, which slows down erosion and connects the stream to the floodplain.

In the Little Muskingum River, there are 73 species of fish, including breeding populations of muskellunge, a species the state of Ohio identifies as a conservation concern. Other endangered species that are sensitive to pollution include lamprey, threehorn wartyback, salamander mussel and deertoe.

“The big issue generally and specifically within this site [is] agricultural impact on a riparian zone,” Ledford says. “There’s no trees there, and there’s nothing to filter out nutrients, so there’s also heavy erosion which deposits tons and tons of sediment into the stream which smothers the stream bed, which makes it hard for macroinvertebrates to survive.”

The shade from the trees will provide more oxygen for the stream and significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the stream. There is another project on private land adjacent to the Little Muskingum where Kopp and the Watersheds team is working to create wetlands where it used to be agricultural land.

Although the benefits of tree planting might not be seen for hundreds of years, Kopp says it’s nice to look at trees in this area and remember someone invested in the land long ago.

“The easiest thing someone can do to improve riparian forest habitat or riparian corridors and buffers is to just not mow your lawn so much; leaving a 50-foot buffer between your creek and your land or doing rotational mowing,” Kopp says. “Even if it’s not adjacent to water … it’s just helping those flows of energy circulate efficiently.”