SOLitude Lake Management offers advanced shoreline erosion control solutions, specializing in bioengineered living shoreline systems. These flexible, eco-friendly systems seamlessly integrate with your existing landscape, allowing you to stabilize banks, halt active erosion, and safely rebuild lost land.
Before exploring our advanced shoreline restoration solutions, it is essential to understand why shoreline erosion occurs and how proactive management can prevent further property damage.
Why Is Pond Shoreline Erosion Dangerous for Your Property?
Erosion is a natural process caused by wind, rainfall, poor design, cultural impacts like mowing and recreation, or simply an aging aquatic ecosystem. These erosion issues are all exacerbated by human disturbance.
Unfortunately, erosion can also negatively affect your lake, stormwater pond, canal, or coastline by:
- Causing loss of habitat and property value
- Flushing excess nutrients into your lake or pond
- Reducing storage volume and waterbody depth
- Displacing topsoil, exposing stormwater pipes or other structures to damage
- Forming trenches or gullies
- Creating safety hazards to the public
Why Are Bioengineered Living Shorelines Recommended for Erosion Control?
There are multiple methods to control erosion, including rip-rap, bulkheads, and other hard armoring systems, which may be ideal in certain scenarios. However, using vegetation to restore embankments—whether it’s turf grass for recreational purposes or native plants for wildlife habitat—has long been an effective strategy for preventing erosion and enhancing community water bodies.
While several best management practices exist to address erosion and establish vegetation, many of these approaches have limitations, such as a shorter lifespan or specific planting restrictions. Fortunately, there is an innovative solution that offers both immediate and long-term stabilization for shorelines and hillsides.
Discover the Benefits of Bioengineered Shorelines
What Is A Bioengineered Living Shoreline?
Bioengineered living shorelines are the latest technology in erosion control. These patented systems offer an innovative, environmentally-friendly solution to immediately stop shoreline and embankment erosion and create a natural foundation for vegetation.
How Are Bioengineered Living Shorelines Installed?
The most effective systems available are designed using a combination of eco-friendly, burlap sock-like fabric and heavy-duty knitted mesh.
Step 1: The system is secured to the stable part of the shoreline.
Step 2: Once secured, it is filled with sand, soil, or local pond muck and sediment. Many property managers choose to pair this solution with proactive hydro-raking projects.
Step 3: After the woven mesh systems are filled, they are secured to the embankment.
Step 4: Once sealed, they can be immediately sodded, planted with native beneficial buffer plants, or seeded through the mesh and fabric layers.
Bioengineered Living Shoreline System Install
What Are The Benefits of Bioengineered Living Shorelines?
It provides immediate stabilization while effectively filtering and buffering run-off water, removing harmful contaminants, and benefiting waterways and water quality, all the while providing a seamless planting platform and long-lasting erosion control.
Restored banks and hillsides can be walked on within just a few days, making bioengineered shorelines a fast, aesthetically pleasing, and long-lasting solution for most properties.
How to Reduce Shoreline Erosion
Cultivating a beneficial vegetative buffer with flowering native vegetation will help stabilize soil during rainstorms and reduce shoreline erosion. Beyond the erosion control benefits, shoreline buffers can also help pull excess nutrients from stormwater runoff, reducing the fuel that drives nuisance weeds and algae growth.
Build An Integrated Management Plan
Just like lawncare, lake and stormwater pond management is an ongoing commitment that requires different approaches throughout the year. While no two waterbodies are the same, each and every aquatic ecosystem is susceptible to shoreline erosion and can benefit from custom management plans that integrate buffer management and nutrient remediation, as well as other sustainable tools like hydro-raking, aeration, biological augmentation, and regular water quality testing.
Whether your waterbody is in its prime or has seen better days, contact your lake management professional to restore and prolong your water resources—starting with the shoreline.
SOLitude Lake Management is a nationwide environmental firm committed to providing sustainable solutions that improve water quality, enhance beauty, preserve natural resources and reduce our environmental footprint. SOLitude’s team of aquatic resource management professionals specializes in the development and execution of customized lake, stormwater pond, wetland and fisheries management programs that include water quality testing and restoration, nutrient remediation, algae and aquatic weed control, installation and maintenance of fountains and aeration systems, bathymetry, shoreline erosion restoration, mechanical harvesting and hydro-raking, lake vegetation studies, biological assessments, habitat evaluations, and invasive species management. Services and educational resources are available to clients nationwide, including homeowners associations, multi-family and apartment communities, golf courses, commercial developments, ranches, private landowners, reservoirs, recreational and public lakes, municipalities, drinking water authorities, parks, and state and federal agencies. SOLitude Lake Management is a proud member of the Rentokil Steritech family of companies in North America.
