The North Texas Municipal Water District has declared victory in its years-long effort to return land to its original state as part of its effort to develop Texas’s first reservoir in the past 30 years.
The Bois d’Arc Lake mitigation project is officially over, says Chuck Montera, a spokesman for the water district.
“We have been able to transform the area at Riverby Ranch in Fannin County to its native state,” Montera said, calling attention to the planting of 6.3 million trees on the 17,000-acre spread, which is roughly the amount of land that Bois d’Arc Lake will claim when the water district finishes filling the body of water.
“We have birds of prey that have returned to the area,” Montera said. He added that the mitigation work resulted in the planting of “indigenous vegetation,” such as walnut, elm, black willow, cottonwood and sycamore trees along streambeds. “These all are varieties of vegetation that are native to the area,” Montera said.
Is that it? Is that the end? Hardly, said Montera, who explained that Resource Environmental Solutions, the contractor hired by NTMWD to do the mitigation work, will remain on site for likely the next 10 years. “They’re going to stay there making sure everything is working as it should,” Montera said.
The big payoff will occur when the water district will be able to open the lake to recreational use once the lake is full, Montera noted. Officials suggest that day is approaching possibly more rapidly than anticipated. Montera said Bois d’Arc Lake might reach the recreational-use goal by late summer.
Montera made the point that the 6.3 million trees are roughly half the number of trees that exist throughout the entire greater Dallas urban forest area, which he said contains 14.7 million trees.
The mitigation project was part of the overall deal that allowed the NTMWD to build Bois d’Arc Lake in the first place. The idea was to restore land equal to the acreage that would be submerged by the lake, which will cover 16,641 acres. NTMWD said in a statement, “The environmental improvements help offset or mitigate the loss of natural habitat associated with construction of Bois d’Arc Lake. They … will have a legacy that extends for generations to come.”
The trees are part of the environmental stabilization goals set out by the NTMWD. “Trees support complex ecosystems for wildlife, help control erosion and flooding and improve air quality,” said RES project manager Matt Stahman. “All the work – stream restoration, tree planting and grass establishment – was done concurrently to create thriving ecosystems. The trees help keep sediment out of the streams and in turn they benefit from water provided by the restored streams,” he said.
Indeed, NTMWD said it planted a million more trees than had been originally anticipated.
“It takes time to learn which habitats work best in each area,” according to RES project ecologist Brandon Hall. “We came up with a plan, but our job is to work with what nature wants to do. There were some areas that we labeled in the plan as grassland, but they ended up being better restored as forest, and vice versa,” Hall said. “So, we replanted more trees accordingly,” he added.
“The main thing we learned was to work with and not against nature,” said Daniel Kampfer, RES project superintendent for the mitigation process. “Now we will take everything we’ve learned here – the successes as well as the setbacks – and work even more efficiently on the next large-scale restoration project,” he said.
Preliminary data suggest a large number of birds of prey are returning to the restored land, said Jim Bednarz, senior lecturer at the University of North Texas. Graduate students from UNT has been analyzing avian life and identified more than 100 bird species, Bednarz said. Many of the species are threatened or protected by the state.
“Think of it like a garden,” said Brandon Hall. “The construction phase of a garden includes planting and tilling, but then it requires weeding and possibly planting a trellis and so forth to maintain. Our work is similar,” he said, “just on a larger, 17,000-acre scale.”