In October 1998, Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Ridge made Chesapeake Bay environmentalists happy by announcing that his state would commit itself to establishing streamside buffers to improve water quality in the Susquehanna River, which contributes one-half of the fresh water that enters the Chesapeake Bay. Even though Pennsylvania doesn't border the bay the way Delaware, Maryland and Virginia do, Pennsylvania has an impact because of the Susquehanna.
In committing Pennsylvania to streamside buffers, Ridge joined Pennsylvania with Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which had adopted a goal of 2,010 miles of new streamside buffers by the year 2010.
Pennsylvania's new commitment is only 14 years (at least) behind the times as far as I'm concerned. Back in 1983 (maybe slightly earlier), Oregon led the nation by passing a Riparian Lands Tax Incentive Program to encourage stream bank conservation by private landowners. Water quality was at the heart of this program just as it is for the Chesapeake Bay effort. Oregon's purpose was to preserve fish habitat in the state's famous rivers such as the Rogue, Willamette, Columbia and Siuslaw.
Oregon's fish experts figured that 75 percent of the state's wildlife depend on streamside habitat. Fish in particular are highly dependent on streamside vegetation for shade that cools the water in summer and harbors insects, seeds and fruit that become either food for the fish or other streamlife that the fish prey upon.
At the time, Oregon estimated that the ecological payoff for conserving streamsides was four years. That's all it takes for grasses to establish themselves along the banks and after that, natural succession takes over. Natural succession is a process by which grasses are slowly replaced by shrubs, then small tress and finally larger trees. Nature does this by carrying seeds on the wind or as hitchhikers on and inside birds and animals. Not every succession system occurs at the same rate. Geographic location and its accompanying conditions affect what happens, but eventually it does happen.
Since 1984, and we knew this all along anyway, experts have discovered that besides providing shade for fish, streamside buffers are good for protecting streams against sediment, fertilizer and herbicide runoff. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) studies in Georgia recently determined that at the edge of one corn field, chemical concentrations were 34 parts per billion (ppb) while in a buffer the concentrations were only one ppb or less. According to the ARS researchers, experimental grasses in a riparian buffer have been shown to reduce 50 percent of the dissolved nitrate from fertilizer. Such buffers also are of interest to states such as Maryland where effluent from chicken farms and related processing plants is suspect in some of the microbial outbreaks in the Chesapeake Bay.
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