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Aquatic Habitat Restoration - Long an exceptional fresh water fishery and a haven for ducks, wading birds and other wildlife, Lake Livingston is nearly 60 years old. It has lost much of its aquatic habitat and the water quality has declined. Once a destination for bass anglers, there has seen a precipitous decline in angling activity. Recreation on Lake Livingston is a major economic engine for numerous surrounding communities and the decline in the fishery has negatively affected local revenues.
Since 2013 and with start-up and continuing assistance from Friends of Reservoirs, Texas Parks & Wildlife (TPWD), the Trinity River Authority (TRA), the Hookers Fishing Club (Livingston, TX), Fishings Future (Tx), and 6 local high school Ag programs, Friends of Lake Livingston (FoLL) is restoring habitat for fish and wildlife populations by adding aquatic and riparian plants along the shoreline to create feeding and breeding grounds and reducing erosion! Working with the local community to achieve these objectives is considered fundamental to the FoLL project. Additionally, the FoLL project partners with the Livingston, TX Hookers club who will be working with the FoLL project team who began introducing hybrid bass into Lake Livingston in 2024 in collaboration with Texas Parks & Wildlife.
The long-term goal of the project is to increase the abundance and diversity of native aquatic plant species and riparian habitat in and around Lake Livingston, TX, thereby improving littoral habitat conditions for the fish community and other aquatic life. Texas Parks & Wildlife has proposed that a successful restoration will need to cover 5% - (4,250 acres) of the lake and/or shoreline habitat. Additionally, through work with our volunteer high schools, we have discovered that a significant number of volunteering students do not know how to fish or if they do, rarely go. As such, as part of our objectives, we have established a permanent partnership with Fishings Future which adds Angler Education to our objectives. At our recent high school plantings, fishing instruction and actual Fishing has now been incorporated into the volunteer effort.

Beginning in 2014, a single plant species (American water willow) was introduced at numerous sites around Lake Livingston. Beginning in 2017, multi-species aquatic plant propagation was added providing expansion of establishing more aquatic habitat. Plants introduced included American Water Willow, Bulrush, Hyssop, and Lilies. These have been underway now for over 8 years.
Since 2017, we have been applying RFHP principles including creating founder colonies that have been established in several locations. Founder colonies are now part of our planting process to provide initial protection against herbivory actions for all new sites. They have been very successful.
Volunteer propagation and plant introduction by the local community has been in place since the project started in 2013 and continues today. Our process at the 6 local high schools includes yearly ecology education (at the start of every school year in late August), propagation of aquatic plant species on each high school campus and later introduction of their own plants at selected sites in Lake Livingston. Part of the instruction also includes Macro-Invertebrate principles and monitoring at their planting sites as an indicator of water quality.
Additionally, we work with the Texas Dept. of Corrections (TDCJ) Ellis Unit-Lee College horticulture class which also includes ecology education outreach as well as plant propagation which supplements high school volunteer plant propagation. This prison unit is used as an initial plant propagation site after which plants are transferred to the high school groups for further growth. We continue to work with several other community groups including Master Gardeners (San Jacinto County), Texas Master Naturalists (Livingston, TX & Conroe, TX chapters), the Livingston, TX Hookers Club, Rotary Clubs, and the Livingston, TX Chamber of Commerce.
Over the course of 2024 and spring of 2025, we have hosted two “high school” plantings where participating high schools students came to selected sites and constructed founder colonies with water willows and additional new aquatic plants. These sites have already shown positive expansion over the last few summer months.
Additionally, one of our participating community sponsors, Carolina Creek Christian Camp, called us in May and requested we sponsor a conservation project for a visiting group, Camp Hope America – Ft. Worth. This Camp Hope Chapter works with kids exposed to domestic and sexual abuse over the course of 12 months. In 2024, Camp Hope planted 1,000 water willows in Carolina Creek next to the camp. In early June 2025, we once again hosted Camp Hope youth at Carolina Creek Christian Camp for Angler Education and Georgia Cube reef building. The kids built 3 new Shelbyville type reefs which were put into Lake Livingston during the summer by the Trinity River Authority in Livingston.
Site monitoring of all of our planted sites occurs every other year in collaboration with our TPWD (Texas Parks & Wildlife) sponsor. Our last survey of planted sites occurred in 2024 and showed some sites that were no longer present and some that were very successful in expansion. Lake Livingston experience severe flooding in early 2024 which damaged numerous sites. We are in the process of re-establishing sites on the northern end of Lake Livingston where the flooding was substantial. The majority of sites that used fencing and founder colony concepts (fencing started in 2017) continue to be highly successful and are expanding dramatically despite these flooding events.
Georgia Cube construction for artificial reef habitat began in 2019 (after viewing this at the FOR conference in Athens, Tx) as an additional effort by the high schools. Since 2023, this evolved into the newer Shelbyville Reef design. Over the course of 2024 and early 2025, FoLL has built a dozen new reefs that were placed into Lake Livingston by the Trinity River Authority. All were built by either the high school kids at participating high schools or by local community volunteers. All sites had their GPS coordinates marked and the coordinates were put on the Texas Parks & Wildlife website for Lake Livingston.
As noted earlier, we discovered that a significant number of our high school students do not know how to fish or rarely fish. As such, we continue to partner with Fishings Future – Tx to provide fishing training at our high school plantings, which they executed at our two spring plantings for several high schools and at a Camp Hope event in June 2025.
Partnering with Fishings Future - Tx allows us to have access to fishing instruction materials, a trailer full of rods and reels with tackle, and a wealth of support material from how to tie fishing knots, to how to fish, to identifying fish types. This will now be a permanent addition to our high school plantings where each kid will get a chance to learn how to fish and then actually fish as part of the morning activities.
Finally, we have formally formed a partnership with the Livingston, TX Hookers fishing club whereby they will lead an effort to privately fund and stock hybrid striped bass into Lake Livingston once permission is granted from TPWD. The Hookers Club has already aligned this project under the Friends of Lake Livingston 501c3 structure.
From the project methods previously described, we continue to add 1,000 to 2,000 aquatic plants at every spring and fall school planting. Since we began using founder colony techniques we learned from the RFHP textbook and FOR feedback, every site we plant spreads beyond its “founder colony” borders and spreads up and down the shoreline in shallow water. Further, these sites survive flooding and cold winter temperatures so that we can continue to expand along other shorelines in need of enhancement. Several of our sites have increased by 5-fold over several years.

Lake Livingston is a huge lake. Its 85,000 acres and there is ongoing opportunity to continue to improve near shore habitat with our conservation effort which we combine with high school conservation education, community conservation education, and ongoing opportunity for fishing and angler education for the students involved in the program. We continue to monitor our planted sites for evidence of success, growth and modification of our planting methods if needed.

Both Texas Parks & Wildlife and the Trinity River Authority are both involved in working with FoLL to approve sites for planting American Water Willows and associated aquatic plants for aquatic habitat enhancement. The lake management plan documents this work with numerous references to the FoLL project work. The TPWD lake management plan also denotes the need for habitat enhancement with numerous references to our project work. A link to the Lake Livingston management plan is included in this submission.

White Bass, Black Bass, Blue and Channel Catfish, Crappie, Striped Bass, Bluegill, Threadfin and Gizzard Shad (as prey species)

Outreach - FoLL has built a broad outreach plan that includes:
• Updated website – friendsoflakelivington.com
• Active Facebook site updates
• Bi-annual community newsletter
• Posting of activity in local community newspapers
• Presentations on the FoLL project to the local “Hookers” fishing club and several community organizations including the Livingston Lions Club, 2 master naturalist chapters in Conroe & Livingston, TX, and the TPWD Texas Waters Education program.
• Yearly Ecology outreach to our 6 participating local high school agriculture programs
o Education on lake ecology, littoral habitat, lake conservation, horticulture, active plant propagation in supplied propagation tanks, invertebrate monitoring, riparian habitat restoration and water quality testing

• Yearly instruction of Texas Master Naturalist concepts at the Texas Dept. of Corrections Lee College horticulture program including lake ecology, plant propagation, and supplied propagation tanks