By Mark DeBord - February 2025

A riparian buffer is an area adjacent to a stream, lake, or wetland that contains a combination of trees, shrubs, and/or other perennial plants. Riparian buffers are used in a wide variety of settings, often on agricultural land, but can also be used in your own back yard. These buffers can deliver a number of benefits including filtering nutrients, pesticides, and animal waste from land runoff; stabilizing eroding banks; filtering sediment from runoff; providing shade, shelter, and food for fish and other aquatic organisms; providing wildlife habitat and corridors for terrestrial organisms. How riparian buffers actually improve water quality - Friends of the Rappahannock

Over the past two years, LACA has planted approximately 5000 native plants along the shoreline at Lake Anna, through generous grants from Dominion and DuPont. Our focus for this coming year will be identifying landowners in the Lake Anna watershed who would be willing to let us do something similar with riparian buffers. Instead of putting plants along the lake shoreline, where they soak up nutrients in the lake, these buffers would be installed in the areas along the streams that flow into Lake Anna, absorbing the nutrients before they get to the lake.

These buffers range anywhere from 10 to 100 feet from the shoreline. The larger buffers absorb more nutrients and provide better shoreline erosion protection, but most any buffer will provide some benefits.

If you know of watershed landowners who may be interested in this, please contact Lara Weatherholtz or Mark DeBord, co-chairs of LACA’s Environmental Preservation Committee. There’s no cost to the landowner for approved projects. Even if you don’t know of landowners in the watershed but would like some advice on how to create your own buffer on your lakefront property, feel free to reach out to us on that.

mark.debord@lakeannavirginia.org