A Twofold Strategy for Riparian Restoration: Combining a Functional Flow Regime and Direct Seeding to Re‐establish Cottonwoods

The transboundary St Mary River drains Glacier National Park, USA, and was progressively dammed and diverted over the 20th century to support agricultural irrigation in northern Montana and southern Alberta, Canada. Following reduced instream flows, the riparian cottonwoods collapsed, and by 2000, few parental trees remained to provide seeds for cottonwood replenishment. As a novel twofold restoration strategy we: (1) worked with the dam operators to deliver a functional flow regime, a regulated instream flow pattern intended to recover some ecological function and specifically seedling recruitment, and (2) delivered cottonwood seeds by direct spreading and by sticking cuttings with seed catkins to allow gradual seed dispersal. The combination of river regulation and seeding enabled cottonwood colonization, and around 1.5% of the applied seeds produced seedlings after the first summer, at sites without livestock or heavy recreational use. Around 15% of those seedlings survived through the fourth summer, with mortality due to drought stress and flood scour, and establishment and survival were higher for the prairie cottonwood, Populus deltoides, than the narrowleaf cottonwood, Populus angustifolia. This study confirmed that the lack of seed source trees limited cottonwood colonization and demonstrated that the twofold restoration strategy provides promise for severe situations where parental trees have been lost. However, this would require substantial effort, and it would be more efficient to provide survivable instream flow patterns that avoid cottonwood collapse. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.