Gorman Clear Fork

A design-build approach to restoration transforms former agricultural land into a functioning forest, and riparian ecosystem for the Richland County Park District.

In a comprehensive large rivers study, the Ohio EPA identified the Clear Fork Mohican River as the only river in Ohio to have experienced a significant decline in water quality between 1980 and 2020, due largely to the impacts of agricultural runoff.

More than 4,600 linear feet of the river and its tributaries flow through a property that had been donated to the West Creek Conservancy for permanent conservation. The property drains 63 square miles of the watershed. The Clearfork Mohican mainstem within the property had been modified for agriculture and other land uses, and its channelization, sedimentation, and habitat modifications caused it to become listed by the US EPA as impaired for Aquatic Life Use and Recreation.

For help in designing and implementing the project to transform 17 acres of agricultural fields into riparian forest and wetland habitat, the West Creek Conservancy and its partner, the Richland County Park District, turned to Biohabitats. Featuring microtopography grading (hummock & hollow and vernal pools), the restoration design restored floodplain function to the Clear Fork Mohican mainstem and tributaries, created a vegetated buffer to protect the river from adjacent agricultural areas and roads, and re-established a mosaic of forested and riparian wetlands.

TAGS

• Design-Build
• Ecological Restoration