By Tracy Brown
Trout Unlimited has been awarded a grant of more than $100,000 for flood resilience work and river restoration work in New York.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos recently announced $316,767 in grant funding for three projects to help reduce localized flooding and restore aquatic habitats in tributary streams of the Hudson River Estuary. TU was a recipient of $104,000 of these funds.
TU and partners Cornell Cooperative Extension of Greene and Columbia County and Housatonic Valley Association will work with the towns of Hillsdale and Copake to identify and prioritize road-stream crossing replacement projects to reduce stream habitat fragmentation and improve community flood resiliency in the headwaters of the Roeliff Jansen Kill in the Hudson River watershed.
This project area includes headwater streams and rivers in the Roeliff Jansen Kill watershed and portions of headwaters of the Taghkanic Creek, Bash Bish and Agawanuck Creek.
The headwaters support native species such as Eastern brook trout and American eel.
Priority will be given to inadequately sized culverts (such as the one pictured above) that threaten both community road infrastructure and the ability for fish and wildlife to move freely in streams and their corridors. The project is already under way and will continue through summer of 2019.
Tracy Brown is Trout Unlimited’s northeastern restoration coordinator. Her work is focused on streams in New York and Connecticut.