Conservation

Highlighted Recent Project: Embrace-a-Stream study of the native trout in our home-waters, the Neponset River watershed

• We recently wrapped up our three-year Embrace-a-Stream study of the native trout in our home-waters, the Neponset River watershed. A huge thank you to the 54 volunteers who collectively donated over 1000 volunteer hours to this effort, and our partners at the Neponset River Watershed Association for making this project a huge success. Together we surveyed over 60 sites, assessed over 113 culverts for fish passage, monitored water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and habitat quality. With the completion of the final report, we now have a road map of future restoration actions to preserve and restore our home-waters.

  What We Found:

• Brook trout still occur in five of the eight streams they occurred in historically:  Beaver Brook, Ponkapoag Brook, Traphole Brook, Germany Brook, and Pine Tree Brook

• While the Department of Fish and Game have records of brown trout occurring in the Neponset Watershed in recent years we did not detect brown trout at any of our sites

• Water temperature was a major factor determining where trout were and were not found. Not surprisingly, streams where brook trout were present had cooler temperatures in the spring and summer. The highest average in streams with trout was 24.2°C and in streams without trout in the summer was 27.8°C, a difference of over 3°C

• Undersized culverts and dams pose a major problem in our watershed, disrupting stream connectivity and artificially warming downstream reaches.

  What’s Next?

  Based on our findings, we compiled a series of recommendations that can be used to plan future projects and future studies:

• We identified stream reaches that support brook trout (no brown trout were identified).  There is a clear impact of temperature, which appears to drive the distribution of trout on the tributaries.

• Restoration efforts should include reducing water temperature, stream side tree planting initiatives, and reservoir release adjustments.

• We have identified stream barriers that create connectivity problems between extant populations, potential headwater habitat, and Neponset River access, which would allow for migration between tributaries. This effort will be kicked off this winter with the removal of the Mill Pond Dam on Traphole Brook.

• We identified a total of 1,784 acres of riparian area as potential sites for land conservation. An additional 209 acres of land were identified as potential sites for riparian restoration projects

  Links:

• Link from our partner on the project, Neponset River Watershed Association: https://neponset.org/embrace-a-stream/

• Explore the results here on this interactive map: https://neponset.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=66413a03525a478fb3e4a86b526d7fb8

• You can access the final report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10EE1OZNYmtSb5E1ZhTuo6u0Tg44LIzw1/view?usp=sharing