Chop and Drop projects are happening across the state in wild trout waters. Here's why

Walking through a large tract of woods in Pennsylvania, you may be surprised to see that someone cut trees and dropped them into a stream.

Those fallen trees are part of an organized effort by many state and local agencies and nonprofit groups.

Large Wood Addition, sometimes called Chop and Drop, projects are happening in several parts of the state to mimic what Mother Nature would have provided if the lands were not clear-cut of timber more than 100 years ago.

“The projects in Pennsylvania have a number of purposes. First and foremost it’s to improve fish habitat with the focus on improving habitat for wild brook trout,” said Jason Detar, Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission fisheries manager for the northcentral region.

The benefits to the streams include retaking leaf litter, holding back silt and sediment that nourishes trees, providing food for insects, amphibians and fish, and reducing peak water flows during flooding.

This type of work is good for remote areas where it’s difficult to get heavy machinery near waterways.

“Where this really shines is in your typical forested watersheds where we have a lack of large wooden materials in the stream,” he said about the younger forests.

“What we are really looking to do with this is focus in on areas with small to middle-size streams where overhead cover and pool habitat is limited, and we are focusing on wild brook trout streams and watersheds,” Detar said. The upper Kettle Creek Watershed in northcentral Pennsylvania is a prime example of where these efforts have helped the waterway.

Work has also occurred in the northwestern part of the state in the Allegheny National Forest, in southcentral Pennsylvania in the Michaux State Forest. Chop and Drop work has also happened in southwestern Pennsylvania, including on Higgins Run in Somerset County.

Tree selection is a critical part of the work.

“Trees that are selected occur back away from the edge of the stream, so we usually look a few rows back from the edge of the stream. Oftentimes it’s a combination of tree sizes that are used,” Detar said.

They try to keep some of the tree on the bank to act as ballast to help keep the tree in place during high water events.

The projects require design and permitting work before the first chainsaws fire up.

“We are really trying to mimic Mother Nature in a natural occurrence of wood in the stream. But when each tree is selected for felling, it’s done in an organized manner with a goal in mind,” Detar said. On average they add wood to the streams about every 100 feet, but it varies from stream to stream.

One side benefit of the work is that many animals walk on the trees to cross streams. Additional benefits include reconnecting trees to floodplains during high-water events.

The trees break up the water flow and move water to low-lying areas. “It helps to dissipate the energy of the floodwater,” Detar said. “You get a lot more groundwater recharge and actually benefits to downstream peak flows because we are holding more water higher up in the watershed."

The woody material provides forage for insects that live in streams. The insects eat the wood and the fish eat the insects.

“There’s really a full ecosystem benefit of the large wood addition. What we do not want to do is open up the canopy as water temperature is the major limiting factor for trout streams,” Detar said about concerns of allowing more sunlight through to the water.

The deeper pools provide cover and protection for the fish from raptors and other predators.

Different groups making the work happen in their own unique ways. For example, he said the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (WPC) uses a tool called a grip hoist to pull trees over to allow the root balls to be used as part of the work.

Down the road anglers should be finding more trout in the waters where this habitat is being made.

“It usually takes a couple years and a couple high-flow cycles for the wood to fully incorporate into the habitat,” Detar said.

Western Pennsylvania Conservancy

Luke Bobnar, watershed projects manager, Upper Allegheny and Lake Erie for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, has been involved in Large Wood Addition projects for about a decade.

“It started small and has grown to the point where we are doing 10 to 20 miles a year,” Bobnar said.

“I see environmental benefits, but I also am a person and like people, so I see the people benefits, too. I’d say it’s a holistic way to treat a watershed,” Bobnar.

“I’ve primarily worked on the Allegheny National Forest. I’ve done over 40 miles of the National Forest, so it would be the Allegheny and Clarion river watersheds as well as Tionesta Creek."

Recently they’ve been working on the Farnsworth branch of Tionesta Creek.

He said the National Forest system has been doing this work for several decades and it’s now happening in the eastern part of the country. “We’re the boots on the ground but the National Forest is definitely the leader in saying we should do this here,” Bobnar said.

“Flooding is hugely important for these sites. Without floods it doesn’t work,” Bobnar said about retaining sediment and nutrients on the floodplain.

“In some instances, you are reactivating a relic side channel that had been, maybe there was a railroad put there and maybe due to historic forest clearing the main channel became entrenched and no longer access that side channel. Putting in some log jams might reactivate that side channel and that’s where your young fish grow or your amphibians or insects,” he explained.

Instead of one route of water going down the valley, the habitat work translates to multiple routes of water in different sizes that provide different types of habitat.

He’s been monitoring the success of his work and said a preliminary finding realized they created a quarter of an acre more of wetlands on a 14-acre area of treatment in the first eight months. “For wetland development, for something to officially become a wetland is usually a process that takes years. I’m really encouraged by those initial results,” Bobnar said.

Animals are walking on the downed trees to cross the streams and he’s aware of a trail camera project. “I think there were 15 or 20 different species that we saw cross the logs. From birds to mammals and amphibians, it was pretty cool,” Bobnar said. Earlier this year when there was a fresh snowfall, he saw bear tracks where one walked over a fallen tree.

Bobnar wants people to know that wood is good for rivers. “Streams aren’t meant to be straight and clear. They are meant to be messy and to our eyes chaotic. That’s where the habitat is. It’s better for the wildlife and what’s ultimately good for them is good for us, too.

“Everything benefits including people in downstream communities.”

Allegheny National Forest

Nathan Welker, aquatics program manager for the U.S. Forest Service in the Allegheny National Forest, remembers how Large Wood Addition projects started happening in the Keystone State.

“Myself and our forest hydrologist Charles Keeports actually were the first two to introduce Chop and Drop to the state of Pennsylvania,” Welker said. They learned about it in Vermont and New Hampshire and were able to train Pennsylvania crews, including the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and the Fish and Boat Commission, about in 2015. Since then, he said groups have done “a ton of excellent work with it.”

The U.S. Forest Service partners with Trout Unlimited and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy on projects. “WPC does the vast majority of the work on the Allegheny (National Forest). They have a dedicated crew that’s been on our forest for several years now and we have an agreement that helps to fund that work for them,” he said.

Before the work started, the streams had little variation in depths or flow patterns. “Fish actually need those for different stages of their life,” he said. “Freshwater trout need to be able to find refuge from predators, coldwater refuges, deepwater refuges for when the streams start to get low and when you basically have a uniform stream reach, those fish don’t have a lot of options when things start to turn against them,” Welker said. They also need areas suitable for reproduction as well.

“What we are doing is kind of the tip of the iceberg,” he said about comparing their projects to what would be found in an old-growth forest primitive stream channel.

Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

Our first project was in 2016 in the Kettle Creek watershed. And that’s pretty much where all of our work has been thus far,” said Troy Stimaker, assistant district forester, Resource Management, Susquehannock State Forest for the DCNR.

The work happens in late fall through spring when the leaves are off the trees and the fish aren’t spawning. “It’s a good time of the year for all of us in the agencies because we’re not as busy with our workload that time of the year,” he said.

It takes several years before they start seeing the true benefits of the work.

“We’ve learned a lot of what we’ve done in the past in terms of techniques that work the best in different size streams,” he said.

Planning and organization are key to finding the right places to pool water and collect sediment.

“We’re very particular about what species of tree," Stimaker said about the selection process. "Certain species of trees, that are little bit heavier, have better branching patterns and tend to gather material better and last a little longer, they don’t rot as fast.

His staff’s work is labor intensive with the crews using chainsaws and wedges. “We’re not using machinery at all,” he said.

The first few years of the work, he said they were able to use ash trees that had died from the Emerald ash borer infestation. “They were already dead or dying and they were prime targets, so we did use a lot of ash for habitat work,” he said.

They use heavy maple, oak and hemlock trees, sometimes in combination, across the water. The heavier trees keep the logs in place during high water times and the hemlocks have plenty of limbs to catch what’s flowing downstream. “It all depends on what species are there,” he said.

Efforts are underway to educate the public about this type of work. Stimaker said people driving by the creeks or hiking may see some interpretive panel signs that explain what the agencies and organizations have done. “Some people are probably wondering, especially fishermen, it does make the fishing harder for sure, because you have a lot more trees and branches in the stream, but it’s making the stream more productive as well,” he said.

Trout Unlimited’s efforts

Phil Thomas, stream restoration specialist for the Pennsylvania Coldwater Habitat Restoration Program of Trout Unlimited (TU), has been involved with the organization for about nine years and has been involved with Large Wood Addition efforts over the past six years.

“It’s restoring it to how nature was before we logged everything in the 1800s,” he said.

“A lot of my work is in some very remote areas and being able to return that stream to what it was before we got here and removed all the trees off the landscape is a pretty cool tool to be able to use and all the benefits. I always tell people this is a watershed-wide approach. It’s not just a spot treatment of a site,” Thomas said.

“We’re doing it for the benefit of the brook trout, but it benefits the whole watershed from the brook trout all the way down to the bugs that the brook trout eat up to the raccoons feed on the fish and the deer that use the structures to bed next to and grouse that drums on top of it; to the fishers and bears that use the logs to traverse across the stream without getting wet."

The animals have responded quickly to the habitat improvements.

“We’ve actually been cutting one day and leave the job site and come back the next morning and we’ve pushed deer bedded out from underneath our structures that were cut the day before. It’s pretty wild how quickly, not only the fish respond to these structures, but the wildlife around it benefits as well,” Thomas said.

Trout Unlimited steers the work at various projects based on surveys and maps of the watersheds.

“TU will do some reconnaissance via computer to see where this may be warranted and do the on-ground recon to see if the watershed warrants this kind of work and we will also work with the landowner and other partners involved to fundraise,” Thomas said.

TU has worked in the Kettle Creek drainage area in some of its tributaries, in the Allegheny National Forest as well as in Clearfield County in a tributary to Mosquito Creek in Moshannon State Forest and on Game Commission property in the area. They also helped a private hunting club with a chop and drop project in Lycoming County on a tributary to Lycoming Creek. “We’ve been bouncing around a little bit here and there where we see a good project,” he said.

Depending on the location, county conservation districts and the Pa. Department of Environmental Protection are also involved in the permitting process, too. “It’s not haphazard,” he said about cutting trees in the forest.

This type of work is less expensive than the way agencies tried to get similar results in the past with traditional structures with log deflectors.

Those projects would cost $30 to $60 per linear foot because of the logs and machinery that was required. With Chop and Drop projects, the work is $10 or less per linear foot.

“It’s very inexpensive compared to the hardened structures that a lot of folks are used to. It’s very inexpensive and efficient and in my opinion, one of the best ways to increase the habitat complexity in a watershed,” Thomas said.

“We’re mimicking the natural succession of the forest. We’re giving the streams a jump-start until the forests reaches maturity and the (trees) start falling in on their own. If we do it right, it’s a one-time deal and then Mother Nature will take it from there.

“I’m not necessarily trying to make it better, but just trying to make it sustainable for the future. With climate change, I think without this technique being used that threat to these species, whether it’s brook or brown trout, I think the threat becomes a lot greater because they don’t have the habitat. They don’t have the cold water groundwater that’s being recharged in there in the summer."

The work is giving wild trout a better chance to flourish.

“The numbers and the size of the fish and the overall health of the watershed is definitely far greater than when we first started,” Thomas said. “They are better now because of this technique.”

With projects every couple hundred feet, stormwater is held back and reduces downstream flooding.

“There’s a whole host of things these projects can do,” he said. “They are very versatile.”

Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him atbwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on this website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on Facebook@whipkeyoutdoors.