Community of Bayfield implementing watershed plan

People living around the Bayfield River continue to implement recommendations from the Main Bayfield Watershed Plan. The watershed plan works with the four principles of the Lake Huron-Georgian Bay Framework for Community Action: Building Awareness, Supporting Community Involvement, Taking Action, and Measuring Success.

Many of the recommendations from this communitybased plan help to address the challenges of urban and rural stormwater runoff. Recommendations include establishing buffers and rain gardens, creating wetlands or berms, maintaining crop residue, following nutrient management plans, and planting windbreaks and trees on marginal land.

To help build awareness, a spring rain barrel blitz saw community groups in Bayfield, Brucefield and Vanastra and three schools sell more than 320 rain barrels to watershed residents. This equates to more than 70,000 litres of stormwater being captured per storm event, and diverted away from local creeks and storm sewers. An additional 35 watershed residents learned how to capture stormwater by creating rain gardens on their property. The community is also working towards creating a demonstration rain garden to help promote rain gardens as a stormwater management tool to local homeowners.

Landowners in the Wise Drain subwatershed, near Clinton, participated in a watershed walk to better understand how water moves across the land and how to manage stormwater flows. Walking the landscape during the spring melt when water is moving across the landscape helps to determine what actions might have the greatest benefit for soil and water conservation, and work best with farming operations. Next steps include helping interested landowners take action on their properties, and walking another watershed this spring.

The Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, a U.S. foundation dedicated to nurturing environmentally healthy and culturally vibrant communities in metropolitan Detroit and to supporting initiatives to restore the Great Lakes Basin, provided Ausable Bayfield Conservation with $100,000 for continued outreach and implementation of the plan in 2014–2016. Funding was also received through the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, and Environment Canada.

To view the plan, visit abca.on.ca/page.php?page=bayfield-main.