University Efforts to Reforest River Campus Tributaries Highlighted by Chesapeake Forests Program

The Chesapeake Forests Program, an initiative of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, has highlighted university efforts to reforest the four short tributaries running off the Blue Ridge Mountains through the Shenandoah River Campus at Cool Spring Battlefield and into the Shenandoah River.

According to a post on the organization’s blog, “these tributaries were likely significant sources of pollutants into the Shenandoah River” when the property was a golf course. Thus, the desire to create a riparian forest buffer, which would “significantly reduce the amount of nutrients reaching our waterways, and also help stabilize stream banks, sustain fish habitat, reduce air pollution, and increase in-stream processing of nutrients.”

Cool Spring Manager Gene Lewis worked with the Alliance to have Shenandoah University classified as a “non-typical, high priority” landowner in order to participate in the USDA FSA Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), the existing primary federal cost-share program for riparian forest buffers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

As a result, 600 trees that were planted at the Cool Spring river campus early last month.

Read more about the effort on the Chesapeake Forests Program blog.