Brothers Ranch Hydrologic Restoration Project

Brothers Ranch Hydrologic Restoration Project

The Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, Elkhorn Slough Foundation and UCSC Hydrogeology are partnering to restore hydrologic processes at the Brothers Ranch. The project area consists of 4 acres of farmland and 1 acre of an ephemeral creek corridor. The creek corridor has been greatly impacted by farming over many decades. Impacts include the channeling of water flow into ditches and excavated channels and the creation of berms and levees to hasten the flow of water off the landscape. Additionally there is much plastic sheeting, abandoned culverts, plastic bags, pipe remnants and other agricultural waste distributed throughout the corridor. Our project will remove the ditches and berms created by past agricultural users to re-create a broad, low floodplain similar to what was believed to have been there in the past and re-vegetate that area with a sedge/rush dominant wet meadow mix that is thought to be very rare in the area now. This treatment will provide needed habitat complexity to a site currently dominated by willows with very little/low additional plant species diversity. Additionally, in the farmland, the project will build two (2) infiltration basins that will receive excedent stormwater runoff resulting from current farming operations and infiltrate that water into the critically overdrafted aquifer below. In restoring hydrologic processes of improved water infiltration, restored floodplain dynamics and reduced and slowed runoff, the project will result in a myriad of benefits to on and off site water resources including attenuation of flooding and decreases in sediment load to downstream resources and on-site, specifically, improved habitat diversity, agricultural refuse remediation and a strong demonstration of how farming and environmental goals can be achieved side by side.

unincorporated area

Monterey

Northern California

Monterey