Fore to Forest for Fins & Feathers: Transforming Acacia Country Club
Suzanne Hoehne
Biohabitats, Inc.
Louisville, KY
What happens when you take a landscape where most of the water is hidden from sight and bring it back to the surface, slow down and retain that water on the landscape, and allow the landscape to utilize the water and function as it should? We did the experiment and found out at Acacia Reservation in Beachwood, Ohio. Acacia Reservation, formerly a private golf course in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, for almost a century had its water piped underground in tile drains and funneled off site as fast as possible in straightened entrenched channels. In 2013, Cleveland Metroparks acquired the property, with the stipulation that it had to be restored to a natural setting. First phase of that transformation was an ecological planning effort, to develop a framework for restoration of the property. Included within this plan was a focus on restoring the waterways and their surrounding floodplains in the reservation (Euclid Creek, its tributaries and the headwaters). Cleveland Metroparks utilized the Stream Function Pyramid to develop a framework to guide achievable restoration goals and objectives. Biohabitats successfully implemented the restoration goals and objectives through a design/build contract with Metroparks. Challenging aspects of the design of the project were numerous: friable shale bedrock, flashy flows, and legacy practices from the golf course. In the headwaters, springs and seeps were daylighted by removing over 3000 linear feet of tile drains and spread out into wetland pockets that hydrate the hilly landscape and provide an aquatic and terrestrial oasis. Over 900 linear feet of channelized Euclid Creek was transformed to a meandering base flow channel with all storm discharges flowing across a new floodplain. Construction brought on new challenges because it occurred during one of the wettest periods on record for the area. Post construction monitoring is ongoing with Cleveland Metroparks, who is using Acacia Reservation as an outdoor laboratory for studying ecological regeneration in an urban setting. This presentation will step the audience from design to construction to monitoring, providing lessons learned along the way and how aspects of this approach might be applicable in other communities that are acquiring properties where the prior usage is no longer popular or necessary – and confronted with the question of what to do with them?
About Suzanne Hoehne
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