Understanding our rivers: Highlights from recent stream table workshops

With most of the region’s flood-related damage occurring in and around our thousands of miles of rivers and streams, understanding how rivers behave and the tradeoffs of different management strategies are essential for planning and mitigating flood risks. However, observing these processes in the field can be challenging—changes to river dynamics can happen over a long period of time and it be difficult to pinpoint how specific decisions or infrastructure changes impact a river. This fall, Lake Champlain Sea Grant staff have been traveling throughout the watershed to educate residents on flood resilience and river science to support infrastructure that works with, not against, the river.

One tool LCSG educators use to illustrate river dynamics is the Emriver stream table. We recently set up our stream table for a “residence” at the North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier during their Resilient Rivers workshop series. “The stream table is uniquely effective for quick, hands-on, and customizable demonstrations to visualize critical concepts in river science,” says Sean Beckett, Program Director for North Branch Nature Center. “These processes are difficult to convey in a static PowerPoint presentation and are also hard to explain while standing at the river – a river's work is usually hard to perceive in real time.”

The stream table is effective for visualizing how rivers move, erode, and respond to storms, making complex watershed processes easy to understand. By allowing participants to model real-world scenarios such as undersized culverts, log jams, or streambank armoring, the table helps people see the ways decisions and land-use practices influence how the river behaves. Participants often bring their own observations such as washed-out roads, streambank erosion, and failed infrastructure to model potential solutions. The stream table helps them connect these experiences to the underlying river processes and test potential scenarios without any real-world consequences. After participating in the workshop, one participant said they thought everyone would benefit from these workshops.

As a hand-on model that uses flowing water and mobile media to simulate sediment dynamics, participants of all ages can learn by shaping the river themselves and modeling different scenarios to see how the river and surrounding landscape responds. At Riverfest, a family-friendly nature festival, elementary-aged children used the stream table to build their own riverside city and watched as river carved new paths. They also observed where was the safest place to build a house to avoid flooding.

At another workshop for adults titled “River Science 101,” residents from Montpelier and surrounding communities modeled different management scenarios such as armoring, dredging, straightening, damming, and road crossing structures to observe how the different practices perform over time and during high flows. “With the river table in residence during our Resilient Rivers workshop series, we could combine stream table demonstrations with actual site visits at the river to convey these concepts to the general public very effectively,” said Beckett.

Lake Champlain Sea Grant is able to provide our stream table at other “residences” for groups that would like to engage their community in hands-on education about river science and flooding. Please reach out to aspasyk [at] uvm.edu (Flood Resilience Educator, Alison Spasyk), for inquiries about hosting the stream table for an event or workshop in your community.