Restoring Strawberry Creek After the 2016 Strawberry Fire

First published in The Midden*, Great Basin National Park's newsletter, Vol. 24, No. 2, Winter 2024. By Meg Horner, biologist.*

2024 was the last year of funding from the Bureau of Land Management's Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA) programme for restoring the land burned by the Strawberry Fire. Since the lightning-sparked fire of 2016, the park and its partners have worked to restore native plants, the stream and fish habitat — and monitored the work to learn what succeeded.

The fire and the first response

The fire burned 4,656 acres of NPS, BLM and private land in August 2016, harming native plants, Bonneville cutthroat trout, the stream, wildlife, cultural sites and infrastructure. The park drew up a three-year Burned Area Rehabilitation plan to replant native vegetation, control invasive plants and replace minor infrastructure. In 2020 it won SNPLMA funding for the Strawberry Fire Restoration Project, and prepared an Environmental Assessment, with public input, covering stream restoration, weed control, revegetation and monitoring.

Repeat photos of a vegetation plot before the fire (2015) and after it (2016, 2017 and 2023). NPS.

Replanting and weeding

• 2017–2019: three aerial seedings, with the Nevada Department of Wildlife and the BLM's regional seed warehouse, spread a native upland mix over 1,200 acres — a "bet hedging" approach, seeding over several years and seasons to give natives more chances to take. Invasive plant surveys covered 1,230 acres, and new outbreaks of Canada thistle, houndstongue and hoary cress were found and treated.
• 2020–2025: a fourth and final seeding in 2022 covered 1,064 acres; vegetation surveys with NDOW tracked success; yearly weed surveys and treatments continued on more than 700 acres.

Low-tech stream repair

With the NPS Water Resources Division and Utah State University, the park chose low-tech, process-based stream restoration, starting in 2021 with post-assisted log structures (PALS) and beaver dam analogues (BDAs) — more than 70 in all. By adding wood, they create backwaters and slow water, widen the channel, push high flows onto the floodplain, trap sediment, stop the stream cutting down, and keep it connected to its streamside plants — giving fish places to rest and overwinter. They suit a steep, dynamic mountain stream with erodible soils and flood risk, and are cheap, low-risk and quick to install. They are not permanent: the stream will rework them.

Park staff drive a post into the stream bed to build a structure that slows the water and helps the creek withstand floods. NPS/M. Horner.

Is it working?

• Trout. Before the fire, Strawberry Creek was the park's most productive stream for Bonneville cutthroat trout — the park's only native trout — found at eight of nine survey sites at an average of 755 fish per mile. Right after the fire they vanished from the hottest-burned stretches: in 2016 they were at only two of nine sites, averaging 114 per mile. In 2024 they were back at eight of nine sites, averaging 511 per mile — the highest estimate since the fire.
• Water. Flow measured below the restoration was consistently greater than above it after the structures went in.
• Pools and backwaters. After the fire the creek lacked wood and ran mostly free-flowing. BDAs immediately make the system's largest pools, a scarce habitat that holds fish in dry years and fills with sediment in wet ones, widening the channel and spreading high water. PALS give fish refuge in high water and push erosion sideways, widening the channel instead of deepening it. Between 2022 and 2024, the share of backwater and overbank flow rose by 10 percent.
• Side channels. Split channels add fish habitat; the stream's length in multiple channels grew by 300 metres from 2022 to 2024.
• Plants. Every seeded species has been found in the burn. Some, like Palmer's penstemon, did well for a couple of years and then became much rarer; others, like mountain big sagebrush and bluebunch wheatgrass, persisted. Hardy perennials — basin wildrye, blue grama, elderberry, aspen and willow — resprouted and are thriving.
• Weeds. Surveys have kept known infestations in check and caught new ones. Hoary cress, a hard-to-kill perennial, took 29 gallons of mix over 1.8 acres in 2017, and one gallon over about 0.01 acre in 2024.

Waiting for beavers

Beavers once used most of the Strawberry Creek watershed. The park's last active beaver dam was recorded in 2005, though beavers live downstream and in the next watershed north. In May 2024 staff found fresh beaver chews at a new BDA — but the animals did not stay, and game cameras recorded none that summer. Bringing beavers back would be the most efficient way to improve the stream and its banks.

Two trees felled by beavers beside the creek. NPS/M. Horner.

Sources

• National Park Service, Great Basin National Park, "Strawberry Fire Restoration Recap," by Meg Horner, The Midden, Vol. 24, No. 2, Winter 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/strawberry-fire-restoration-recap.htm
• The original's aerial photograph of the burn is credited to an individual photographer and is not reproduced here.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.