Professional Expertise to Guide River Edge Restoration Best Practices

Friends' planning team is regularly out in the field, visiting and facilitating advisory conversations with river-edge property owners. Over the past several months, Friends has visited property owners on the North Branch of the Chicago River, Bubbly Creek, and the Little Calumet River to discuss good riparian edge management and restoration practices that address the challenges that river edge owners face.

Friends is seeing a higher occurrence of erosion issues due to climate change, deteriorating retaining structures, stormwater infrastructure maintenance issues, and questions about invasive removal practices. Each of these conversations is centered on how to maintain and restore the riverfront in a way that supports our ecological health, water quality, and public access goals for the Chicago-Calumet River System.

Our team is supported in this work by the technical expertise of professional volunteers that make up our 18-member Planning Committee. The Planning Committee provides technical guidance to Friends’ initiatives related to river system landscape, planning, engineering issues. In each site visit, the team shares strategies for phasing out invasive species, replacement with multi-layered native plants and shrubs, as well as ways to stabilize the toe of the bank using plants, boulders, and woody structures that both retain the soil and promote good aquatic habitat. This approach is encouraged rather than new concrete and/or steel walls that increase erosion downstream and do not provide any ecological value.

Our planning and policy work has a strong record of advancing the restoration and protection of the river system. Friends secured Chicago’s first river protection ordinance in 1983 and was instrumental in the creation of the original city of Chicago River Corridor Development Plan in 1999, which codified required setbacks and landscape treatments along the river. We also introduced advanced tools for the implementation of river-edge improvements adopted in the Chicago River Design Guidelines in 2019, including our Developer Resource Guide, River Edge Development Tracking Map, and the awarding winning Natural Solutions Tool.

If you have technical knowledge and are interested in joining the Planning Committee, please reach out to Adam Flickinger, Friends’ planning director at aflickinger@chicagoriver.org