In the same way that we rely on different food sources to keep us healthy, adding a variety of native plants (evergreen and deciduous trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns, and groundcovers) to your riparian buffer supports food web diversity and habitat availability for terrestrial insects, birds, wildlife, and fish. For example, leaf litter from native species such as the big leaf maple is a high-quality food source for aquatic insects such as stoneflies, which in turn are a food source for salmon and trout.
With so many choices of plants to choose from, it can quickly get complicated and costly to add plants to your streamside. Ideally, you'll want to keep as much of the existing native vegetation as possible, but you may need to make sure that certain existing plants don't outcompete any new plantings. This means that you may need to provide some extra care (like trimming existing plants back) to ensure that your new plantings are able to obtain the resources they need for survival (water, light, and nutrients). When adding new plants to your streambank, we recommend narrowing your scope to a diverse range of 10 different species (i.e., a mix of groundcover, shrubs, conifers, and deciduous trees rather than all of 1 category) and building from there.