ORANGE — On a mid-June afternoon, the Waits River in Groton State Forest gurgled under a bridge just off Route 302 and into a picturesque scene. The water used multiple channels to make its way across the riverbed — faster or slower, deeper or shallower — rippling as it rushed over gravel and stone and lapping lazily at the sandy shore that led into a floodplain forest.
Every 100 feet or so, the river traversed a pile of logs and brush. While the jumble mimicked what could exist naturally, nature was not the architect behind this particular tangle of woody material. Instead, contractors working for the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department had carefully cut and installed each tree in order to eventually create this exact scene. Their goal? Creating a perfect home for Vermont’s state fish, the brook trout.
Jud Kratzer, fisheries biologist with the department and the driving force behind the wood structures, looked out at the river. He pointed to places where brook trout were likely hiding: under the cover of roots near the shore in the slow water, where fast water nearby serves as a “conveyor belt of food,” and in a deep plunge pool carved out under the structure by last summer’s deluge of floodwater.
“We put a camera down there, and there’s ‘brooks’ under there,” Kratzer said. “But, I mean, I didn’t need a camera to tell me that.”
In 2024, Kratzer oversaw the assembly of numerous wood piles on the Waits River, a technique known as strategic wood addition. The practice has been shown to improve habitat for brook trout, anglers’ most popular target and an important indicator of ecosystem health. The results also provide numerous additional benefits for wildlife and people.
Over the past 13 years, Vermont Fish & Wildlife has worked together with the nonprofit Trout Unlimited to implement strategic wood addition on 68 miles of northeastern Vermont headwater streams, which join together to form larger rivers, Kratzer said. According to the department’s conservative estimates, those “fairly low-cost” efforts have increased the number of brook trout in that area by 83,000.
The “calendar-picture streams” people are used to are “wide, flat and shallow” from a fish’s perspective, said Erin Rodgers, the Vermont and Massachusetts program manager for Trout Unlimited, in an email. They lack places to hide from predators, don’t have much draw for the insects fish eat and easily heat up during summer — “death for coldwater fish that can’t tolerate prolonged heat.”
“Putting large wood back into a stream changes all that,” Rodgers wrote.
The wood pile is designed to collect sticks and leaves that insects — which fish eat — can feed on, she said. The structure causes water to flow at different speeds, allowing sediment to gather in slow-moving areas while faster-moving water creates deeper channels. This “creates diverse in-stream habitat for lots of different species, creates protected spaces so adult fish can hide from predators, and the pool formations (make) deeper coldwater refuge,” Rodgers said.
Kratzer has studied, developed and led the state’s strategic wood addition efforts since 2012, and has presented about the technique across the eastern United States and Canada. Last year, he received an award from the American Fisheries Society recognizing that work as an outstanding project in sport fishery development and management.
However, back when Kratzer began exploring “strategic wood addition” (a term he came up with), the scientific literature on the process was divided and, he said, members of his department were somewhat resistant to the idea: Vermont rivers look fairly undeveloped and pristine to the untrained eye.
But the pristine-seeming rivers of the Northeast looked much different when Europeans first arrived, Kratzer explained. Those settlers saw vast forests filled with huge trees that fell into the rivers when they died — what strategic wood addition emulates. Then, during the 18th and 19th centuries, those rivers were cleared and even straightened to transport logs and boats.
“We are several generations removed from seeing our rivers like they were originally,” Kratzer said, adding that when the project began, he thought the state “could do better.”
In a 2013 study, Kratzer researched the factors limiting brook trout abundance in northeastern Vermont. While the study showed that the most important factor was water temperature (the fish like it cool), the second most important was, in fact, how much wood was in the stream (more is better).
Armed with that data, strategic wood addition began. Within three years after the structures were constructed on the East Branch of the Nulhegan River deep in the Northeast Kingdom, electrofishing data showed that brook trout biomass — both the number of fish and their size — approximately tripled.
In addition to its benefits for fish, Kratzer points out that the practice can help people too: “strategic wood addition slows water down and pushes it out into the forest, so it doesn’t just come rushing downstream to where we all live.”
He and Rodgers are both quick to note that a lot of precaution is taken to secure the wood piles into the bank so that they stay locked down during flood events. Also, most of the work has been done in the headwaters, where there is very little human infrastructure.
Even after major flooding in both 2023 and 2024, Kratzer’s team found that 82% of its sites (over 1,000 are tagged) are in the same place and still performing at least one function of a successful strategic wood addition structure. The others, he said, are usually just lodged slightly downstream.
Along with the water, the wood additions also retain sediment and nutrients, storing them in the headwaters for the benefit of the ecosystem, “instead of transporting them downstream where they clog culverts and degrade water quality,” Shayne Jaquith, watershed restoration manager for The Nature Conservancy in Vermont, said in an email.
The Nature Conservancy has implemented strategic wood addition on some of the land it owns in Vermont, Jaquith said. The nonprofit organization is working to train others in the practice, increase awareness among landowners and connect people to available funding sources “so that the use of strategic wood addition as a river restoration technique increases dramatically,” he said.
Kratzer has similar plans: his team is close to completing their work on the publicly owned land in the Northeast Kingdom where the practice can be beneficial, and soon expects to shift his role to facilitating the same work on private lands throughout the state. Currently, he said, only one contractor is trained in the practice.
The technique is slowly spreading to other states. Kratzer wrote a handbook on the practice in 2020, and said that strategic wood addition is now in use in other parts of New England, West Virginia and as far south as Tennessee. In Vermont, Trout Unlimited has also implemented the practice on several watersheds in central and southern parts of the state.
In the Western United States, Kratzer said, similar practices adapted for the distinct landscape are in use.
Last summer, Kratzer was invited to Prince Edward Island to present his work to all of its province’s watershed groups, which had been pulling wood out of rivers for a long time and thought it was the best thing to do, he said. Kratzer called the experience “the most rewarding thing” he’s done in his entire career, being able to completely flip their perspective on wood in streams just by presenting his research.
“I’ve come to believe that the single greatest benefit of this work isn’t just the increase in brook trout or the increase in stream function,” he said. “It’s the message that wood in streams is beneficial.”
Not in all places, though, Kratzer was clear: Wood that is endangering a bridge or culvert has reason to be removed. But in the many places where it doesn’t pose a threat, it should be left and even enhanced, he said.
On the same mid-June afternoon — 40 miles away from the picturesque scene in Groton State Forest — two members of Kratzer’s team carried a chainsaw, axe and orange hard hats along a brook at the base of Wheeler Mountain in Willoughby State Forest. About every 80 feet, they stopped to strategically cut, drag and position trees and brush across Big Valley Brook, wedging the structure into the bank for years to come, covering about a quarter mile a day.
Rodgers admits that, when strategic wood additions are first installed, “it is pretty ugly.” There are limbs and leaves everywhere, and you can barely see the stream under trees, she said. But the structure naturalizes quickly and makes the river ecologically healthier.
According to Kratzer, the department likes to say that “fish grow on trees,” — the living forest provides benefits that continue when trees die and fall into the water, whether the process be natural or human-assisted.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Shayne Jaquith’s last name.
