This article was originally published by the Chesapeake Bay Journal, an award-winning nonprofit news organization that has been covering environmental issues in the Bay region for more than 30 years.
At first glance, the vegetation along the narrow creek in East Buffalo Township’s Turtle Creek Park looks much like many other Pennsylvania streambanks degraded through centuries of development. There’s a thick blanket of invasive species — largely reed canary grass — and not much in the way of tree cover.
But a closer look reveals something else popping up through the grass. Roughly foot-long sections of branches, cleanly lopped off at the top, protrude from the ground every few steps along a roughly 1,000-foot stretch. Most of them have put down roots and sprouted branches bearing leaves of the silky dogwood, a native shrub.
The sticks are, in fact, “live stakes” — branches cut from live wetland trees and shrubs and thrust into the ground by volunteers with the Live Stake Collaborative, a riparian restoration initiative led by the Chesapeake Conservancy.
In time, these stakes, planted in 2023 and 2025, will grow into shrubs large enough to shade out the invasive grass. As they mature, they’ll soak up nutrients washing into the water from upland farms — turning excess nitrogen and phosphorous into native plant tissue rather than pollutants flowing into the creek and, ultimately, the Chesapeake Bay. Their deepening roots will secure the creekbank, preventing erosion.
These benefits will have been accomplished with little more than pruning shears and a team of enthusiastic volunteers.
Live staking is not a new restoration tool. It’s been known for centuries that cuttings from certain plants, though certainly not all, will sprout new roots, stems and foliage when immersed in water or wet soil. But the Live Stake Collaborative, founded in 2019, has expanded the technique’s use in planting forest buffers along streams, courtesy of refrigeration. This spring, the group announced that they have planted 100,000 live stakes on almost 40 acres along Pennsylvania streams with the help of more than 1,000 volunteers.
People are drawn to the project because they quickly see the impact, said Michaela Rolecki, an AmeriCorps member and current volunteer coordinator for the Chesapeake Conservancy. “You can literally put a stake in the ground and come back the next year and see it growing.”
The program began in 2019 when aquatic ecologist Adrienne Hobbins, a program manager at the Chesapeake Conservancy, first learned that a nursery operated by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) was refrigerating live stakes until they were ready to plant them.
Hobbins had previously been part of a team that helped restore a watershed with live stakes purchased from a nursery. She also knew of conservation groups that saved money by cutting and then immediately planting their own live stakes, but that approach was only possible within a narrow timeframe each spring. If stakes can be kept refrigerated, Hobbins realized, volunteers could collect all through winter and early spring.
“It just gives you a lot more flexibility on timing,” Hobbins said.
Hobbins and the Chesapeake Conservancy teamed up with Susquehanna University, DCNR, Bucknell University and the Merrill W. Linn Land and Waterways Conservancy to assemble and train volunteers to cut live stakes. Approximately 25 helped that first year.
Since then, more groups have joined the collaborative to provide volunteers, as well as knowledge about where stake collectors can find healthy stands of native wetland trees and shrubs. Homeowners often invite cutting teams onto their land.
Collections begin each fall after plants have gone dormant. A single long branch about the width of a finger can quickly be cut into several stakes about two feet long. Rolecki estimates that she and a group of seven volunteers can collect around 1,000 live stakes in about four hours.
They refrigerate the stakes until spring, when they hand over garbage bags full of them to conservation organizations, who plant the stakes along degraded streambanks. Volunteers tap the stakes with a mallet or simply push them in.
“We have some sites that are so wet, you can just [push the stakes into] the ground, and you can probably get a couple done in a minute,” Rolecki said.
After dormancy breaks, the stakes quickly grow roots and branches in their new home.
The process is much faster and cheaper than planting saplings. But live stakes only work at locations where their bases reach the water table, which restricts their use to within about 15 feet of a stream. For streams with especially steep banks, volunteers may only be able to plant into the bank itself. So, in some instances, the conservancy and their partners use both techniques: live stakes where they are viable and saplings where they are not.
Live staking is not nearly as widely practiced or well-studied as tree planting. Exactly why the approach works with some woody wetland species and not others isn’t yet clear, said Matthew Wilson, a stream and restoration ecologist at Susquehanna University, who has been involved with the initiative from the start.
In 2019, Wilson and Hobbins set out to learn more about live stake survival rates by planting 1,800 stakes from eight species commonly used in streamside restorations. In 2023, they reported that there was huge variation in survival to one year. Silky dogwood plantings had a 67% survival rate, while only 9% of red osier dogwoods and 1% of gray dogwoods survived. Buttonbush performed about as well as the silky dogwoods. Not a single spicebush survived.
“There’s got to be something species-specific about the physiology,” Wilson said.
Matthew Baker, a watershed ecologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County who is not involved in the Live Stake Collaborative, hadn’t heard of planting live stakes as a streamside buffer strategy before the recent milestone announcement. But the approach immediately made sense to him because many wetland species spread through a similar natural process, called fragmentation, where portions of their branches break off, get carried along the waterway, and then root and form new trees. Staking, he said, seems to be mimicking that process.
One challenge moving forward is finding enough source shrubs and trees for new stakes. The team is careful not to damage healthy riparian buffers by overharvesting stakes in any one spot.
But in time, their own stakes — fully grown into shrubs and trees — could become source material. The team already collected from one of their earlier planting sites that really took off, Wilson said. “The willows are taller than me.”