Bird Research at NTMWD’s Riverby Ranch Prove Restoration Efforts Successful

As part of the North Texas Municipal Water District’s Bois d’Arc Lake project, restoration of over 15,000 acres at Riverby Ranch in Texas is the largest permittee-responsible restoration of its kind in North America. This 20+ year restoration project, led by RES LLC, the nation’s largest environmental solutions provider, is restoring the previous pasture and crop land back to its native state, creating a mosaic of habitats for wildlife while satisfying the environmental permits for the Bois d’Arc Lake project.

The response of the wildlife has been off the charts. Restoration of native vegetation communities brought back the insects. Restoration of emergent wetland communities and streams brought back the frogs and aquatic macroinvertebrates. These in turn have brought back the small mammals, the snakes, and the birds.

The growing populations of birds at the ranch are a key sign of success. Tessa Boucher, a graduate student at University of North Texas, created a research project to track how this restoration is changing the bird population at Riverby Ranch. Her research started last summer and will be completed this summer, in July 2022, and the early results are promising which, in turn means, the restoration techniques used here can be deployed confidently in similar habitats across the region.

Watch this incredible story about The Birds of Riverby Ranch in Episode 17 of RES’s Restoring at Scale video series.

Restoring at Scale, Episode 17: The Birds of Riverby (Captioned) from RES on Vimeo.