Soil bioengineering uses live plant materials to provide erosion control, slope and stream bank stabilization, landscape restoration, wildlife habitat, biodiversity support, and carbon sequestration. Soil bioengineering techniques can build resilience into a watershed, while minimizing costs and efforts to control erosion.
The use of plant material to stabilize slopes provides an economical, low maintenance, and aesthetically pleasing method of stabilizing slopes, while promoting successional reclamation of disturbed sites. Bioengineering also leverages the process of transpiration to move water out of wet / waterlogged soils and into the atmosphere, mitigating the risk of slope movement due to high soil moisture.
The key to bioengineering is the use of woody vegetation (trees and shrubs) for stormwater and erosion control. Woody vegetation presents many benefits including: