Our annual Spring and Fall cleanups make a significant positive impact for the river. Typically over 300 individuals participate in each clean-up and collect over 6,000 pounds of trash from accessible river banks over a 15 mile stretch of river.  We partner with Mountain View High School Learn & Serve students in organizing the cleanups each year.

 

FOR has established vegetated buffers at the new water intakes for Motts Run Reservoir in Fredericksburg and Hunting Run Reservoir in Spotsylvania County. Scores of FOR volunteers planted both deciduous and conifer trees and shrubs to create a visual buffer between the river and the pumphouse structures. Other FOR volunteers have assumed the watering tasks for the large numbers of trees throughout drought periods, and helped successfully treat a nasty blight that threatened the plant stock. Funding: FOR operational, County of Spotsylvania, Pinelands Nursery.  

Culminating over a year of work by FOR and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), a 118 acre conservation easement was recorded on Linden Farm in Orange County. The easement is made up of forested stream buffers that traverse this 1,000+ acre livestock operation in the Rapidan river's rolling Piedmont watershed. FOR brought CBF and the landowner together to negotiate the major part of the easement. FOR wrote another grant proposal to fund the purchase of easement on the remaining acreage, plus to install livestock exclusion fencing. Linden Farm is now one of the best examples in the region of an economically viable livestock operation that is also on the leading edge of water quality protection.  

FOR continues to make significant progress in our riparian restoration and livestock exclusion fencing program. In partnership with the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District, two significant reaches of headwater streams were protected from livestock access via new fencing in 2002. These areas will also be restored with buffer plantings. Funding: Various state and federal grants, Corps of Engineers, Virginia Wetland Mitigation Trust Fund  

Phragmites (frag-my-teez) is an exotic, invasive species that has destroyed the habitat value of vast acreages of wetlands along the East Coast. FOR assisted the Rappahannock Phragmites Action Committee in combatting the invasive species on private lands in the lower tidal Rappahannock. FOR applied for and received a grant to assist the committee in funding a large aerial spraying operation which eradicated the plant on several hundred acres of tidal marsh. This is allowing native plants to return to the wetlands and restore the historic productivity and ecological integrity of the lower Rappahannock wetlands.