Landscape Architect Articles

LASN 2010 Firms: Biohabitats, Inc.09-08-10 | News

Biohabitats, Inc.,
Baltimore (plus regional offices in Louisville, Cleveland, Raleigh, Glen Ridge, N.J., and Denver)

Since 1982, Biohabitats has helped public and private sector clients improve water quality, increase wildlife habitat and restore degraded ecosystems. The firm has facilitated educational opportunities through ecological assessment, planning and restoration initiatives.

Biohabitats’ practice is entirely ecological restoration, conservation planning and regenerative design. The firm has an interdisciplinary team of landscape architects, ecologists, biologists, soil scientists, natural resource planners, geomorphologists, planners and engineers.

Principle: J. Keith Bowers, RLA, PWS
Design Software/Technology: MicroStation V8, AutoCAD Civil 3D 2007-2010 for drafting; ArcView and ArcGIS for mapping; Adobe In-Design CS3 for graphics and electronic renderings. Biohabitats has developed several software applications to suit its specific information and analysis needs: wetland water budget assessment, stream morphology classification and characterization of stream condition. Biohabitats has also adapted a spreadsheet for streambank erodability hazard index ratings.

Freshkills Park North Park Wetland Restoration, New York, N.Y.

By restoring a narrow strip of actively eroding tidal marsh fringe on land previously occupied by the world’s largest landfill, Biohabitats is helping the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation create linkage for wildlife and critical future habitat to accommodate coastal migration in anticipation of sea level rise. The design, a mosaic of coastal marsh, grassland and scrub-shrub habitat, aims to regenerate a living shoreline in which coir logs and live mussels form a breakwater and allow increased sedimentation within the marsh.

Stream Restoration for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Ignacio, Colorado

The Ute Indians are Colorado’s oldest continuous residents. Boihabitats had the honor of collaborating with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe on the restoration of four degraded stream sites to reduce erosion and flooding, and create riparian habitat on tribal land.