Stewarding Riparian Forests to Take Root and Thrive
Written by: Kerri Grimaldi
Above: ICN Crew installs a willow fascine to prevent knotweed spread and shoreline erosion at Riverside Park in Warren.
At the Intervale Center, we aren’t only growing Vermont’s stock of riparian trees and shrubs—we’re also stewarding restoration projects to help young trees take root and thrive. This year, the Intervale Center’s Conservation Nursery Crew is stewarding 50 acres of young forest across Vermont’s Lake Champlain Basin thanks to funding from Lake Champlain Basin Program (LCBP) and Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC).
Above: ICN Crew revisits willow fascine planted in 2025 with Healthy Ecosystems funding at Farley Memorial Park in Warren.
Restoring riparian buffers on farms and other lands is one of the most efficient and effective ways we can meet our state’s water quality goals. Trees uptake phosphorous runoff, strengthen stream and riverbanks, mitigate flooding, and provide important habitat for fish and wildlife. In these ways, they provide a critical backbone to our food system, as we rely on clean water, healthy soils and habitats, and flood disaster mitigation to grow food!
Perhaps just as critical to planting these trees is stewarding them in their first few years of growth. By providing maintenance like weeding and trimming competing vegetation, removing invasive plant species like knotweed, and removing tree tubes, we help ensure young trees grow to become healthy forests and reach their full potential to clean water and enhance habitat.
As a recipient of LCBP’s Clean Water and Healthy Ecosystems grant for many years, the Intervale Conservation Nursery has been able to send our expert Crew to steward projects that might not have had the funding or capacity for continued maintenance otherwise. Working in close collaboration with other conservation partners in the Basin, like Friends of the Winooski River and Vermont Land Trust, we identify high-priority projects that need stewardship and grant funding to succeed.
One of these projects took place at Riverside Park in Warren. The ICN partnered with the Town of Waitsfield and Friends of the Mad River to remove invasive knotweed that was spreading at the 1-acre restoration site. In addition to removing knotweed, the Nursery Crew also built willow fascines—bundles of plant material tied together and staked into topsoil—from willows found on site to border the knotweed zone and prevent future knotweed spread and shoreline erosion.
Above: Ben Siegal, ICN Crew Member, string trims around young trees at Ethan Allen Homestead.
At Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, the Crew is helping Winooski Valley Park District (WVPD), Winooski Natural Resource Conservation District (WNRCD), and New Farms for New Americans (NFNA) o transition farmland to riparian buffer. After major flooding in 2024, WVPD and NFNA concluded that some of their fields were too low-lying in the floodplain to continue farming. The new forest buffer planted this spring (with Intervale Conservation Nursery trees) will strengthen soils, protect the adjacent active farm fields from future flooding, and improve water quality for the Winooski River. In July, the Nursery Crew stewarded the new 2-acre buffer by string trimming competing vegetation around the young trees.
This stewardship work supported by LCBP and GLFC strengthens a coordinated effort across conservation partners in the Lake Champlain Basin to restore land along our waterways, improving water quality and increasing the health of our ecosystems, our communities, and our food system.
This project was funded by an agreement awarded by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in partnership with the Lake Champlain Basin Program, GFLC manages contract tasks and provides input on the program's activities through a partnership with the LCBP Steering Committee. The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of GLFC, the LCBP Steering Committee, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or causes constitute endorsement or recommendation for use.