 Hi, I'm Dr. Christa Ailert. I'm an assistant professor in the natural resource management department with South Dakota State University and I also serve as the state extension range specialist and with me today I have one of my colleagues and also my grad student. Hi, Dr. Jamie Brennan. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science at South Dakota State University and livestock grazing extension specialist. I'm James Bollard. I'm a master's degree student and a graduate research assistant with the South Dakota State University West River Extension Office. My work is primarily centered around riparian restoration using beaver dam analogs and post assisted log structures. And today we're in western South Dakota at the South Dakota State University Cottonwood Field Station located near Wall, South Dakota and the work that James is doing for his master's is largely centered in western South Dakota and the reason for that is because a lot of partners, so we work with NRCS and the Nature Conservancy as well as other partners such as U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Services as well as South Dakota Game Fish and Parks. A lot of these partners came together several years ago and recognized that our riparian areas in western South Dakota really were not kind of getting the attention from a management perspective that they needed and that water limitation is of course a really high concern in western South Dakota. Riparian areas are tremendously important in terms of things like forage production, the plant communities that are often associated with riparian areas tend to act as a sponge and so they'll actually soak up a lot of the water on the landscape and then slowly release that where we are here in western South Dakota and really a lot of the arid west in general on rangelands your biggest limiting factor is water and so the more that we can do out here to slow down water to hold it on the landscape for a longer period of time the more available water you're going to have for wildlife for livestock that are dependent upon that water source and better quality of forage that you're going to have for animals that are grazing as well. And James is our master's student and he has extensive background and knowledge of using these low-tech process-based restoration techniques like the beaver dam analogs and the post-assisted log structures or PALs and so he's been able to over the last year and a half have a pretty decent impact on the landscape in a short amount of time. Yeah you can see this creek behind us is incised a bit where the stream has dug into its own bed and that causes issues with water on the landscape because the water is so far below the surface levels a lot of our plants can't reach it anymore and it just creates these drier more barren areas that don't support a healthy wildlife or livestock population. By adding these structures in we cause the water to slow down and back up which not only helps the water to get back into the streams it helps to rebuild the stream bed by causing sediment to drop out of solution. When that happens it causes the stream to fill back in so that eventually with any luck our structure will actually disappear into the stream bed itself and we can progress and ultimately the goal is to reattach this stream to its original historical flood plain if possible. So obviously using some of these low-tech process-based techniques like BDAs and PALs can take some time but what we've been able to achieve at our Cottonwood field station here as well as at some of our cooperating producer ranches in Northwest South Dakota is we have seen water in places that historically hasn't kept water on the landscape and what's one of the unique things that's happened as the result of this project is that particularly at Cottonwood we were able to get beaver to recolonize our stream right James? Yeah we had a few months after installing our structures we had a rain event that dropped about three quarters of an inch of rain in a day. This flood that resulted actually destroyed a lot of our structures but the structures that remained slowed down enough water that it created habitat that was interesting enough for beavers to move in. In previous years the beavers had been active on the stream about two miles upstream and a mile downstream from our site but they hadn't actually stayed within the area to build dams. Within less than two months of building our structures and having a flood event we had beavers actively colonizing our research reaches. So not only are there you know the obvious benefits of these structures in terms of slowing and retaining water on the landscape but also kind of the less obvious benefits that Dr. Brennan mentioned earlier is that you know ideally we are going to increase the water holding capacity of the soil and like James said reconnect the floodplain and what that ultimately is going to do from a economic and sustainability standpoint for the north central region is going to increase the forage production of these ranches and that therefore translates to more pounds on the animals on the livestock the cattle that these producers are running and ultimately what that means is more money in their checkbook at the end of the day. A lot of times when we think about efforts to improve you know livestock production efforts to improve conservation of wildlife goals we have a lot of big plans but I think the cool thing about these BDAs is that they're such a low input high leverage solution to a lot of these stream systems that you have out here where it's just a matter of time a handful of posts and whatever local materials you have on the ground and you could really start building these stream beds back. Also I've had producers that I work with who aren't on they're not any of our cooperative ranches currently for this riparian project you know but I work closely with them on other projects and they're starting to implement kind of their own like producer BDAs and pals like they're you know throwing whatever logs and like James mentioned earlier like debris woody debris that they have like into their streams and they're starting to see water slow and collect on the landscape and you know they're just doing it kind of for let's look and see what happens but they've been pretty impressed what they've been able to achieve again using hardly any materials any kind of monetary input into getting this started. So there's lasting implications for this research that we're only just beginning to unravel as it relates to western South Dakota and the north central region.