American Rivers is working with the National Park Service to restore High Sierra meadows in wilderness within Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks/American Rivers, Maiya Greenwood

Wilderness areas are supposed to be off-limits to motorized vehicles and power tools. So how do you go about restoring High Sierra meadows that have been subjected to overuse by human visitors? At Sequoia National Park, crews from American Rivers are working with the National Park Service to restore impacted meadows by hand.

Why is a river organization working in mountain meadows? Because, the organization explains, "meadows play an integral part in the Sierra hydrologic system, which provides more than 60% of California’s developed water supply. Healthy meadows provide a suite of benefits including improved groundwater storage, enhanced water quality, reduced peak flood flows, and critical habitat."

According to the nonprofit organization, it has been estimated that as much as half of all Sierra meadows have been adversely impacted by human use. With that in mind, the American Rivers California headwaters team has been working since 2012 to restore meadows. So far the team has "completed restoration projects on approximately 730 meadow acres and led 16 projects in 11 watersheds across the Sierra."

The team's latest project involves working with Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, where roughly 93 percent of the parks' landscape is designated wilderness, "to build momentum around meadow restoration in designated wilderness."

"Our project is aimed to address the wilderness restoration conundrum by determining 1) which wilderness meadows are degraded, and 2) what restoration techniques both effectively address meadow degradation and maintain ‘wilderness character,’" writes Maiya Greenwood, a conservation associate with American Rivers' California Headwaters Conservation. "We addressed the first question by completing a field assessment of 60 wilderness meadows using the Meadow Condition Scorecard, a tool American Rivers developed in partnership with the Forest Service, UC Davis, and others to rapidly evaluate meadow condition and restoration potential.

"We are currently addressing the second question by completing a restoration project to pilot wilderness friendly techniques at Log Meadow in Sequoia National Park," she added in a recent post. "This meadow is accessible, and outside of designated wilderness. We are piloting these techniques at a non-wilderness meadow so that we can test logistics and efficacy of techniques prior to applying them in remote wilderness areas with more complicated and costly logistics."

The lessons learned at Log Meadow will be used to help develop restoration plans for degraded wilderness meadows throughout the two national parks.