The Agricultural Reach of Oak Creek drains OSU croplands and research farm facilities managed by the Department of Animal Science, where pastures support seasonal grazing, hay, and other forage crops and irrigation water is pumped from Oak Creek. Scientists and managers in Animal Science, Fisheries & Wildlife, Forest Engineering, and Bioresource Engineering are establishing conservation practices such as riparian fencing and plantings to improve stream, wetland, and riparian conditions while meeting agricultural production objectives. The area also serves as an outdoor laboratory for OSU students in Animal Sciences, Fisheries & Wildlife, Soil Science, Zoology, and Forestry, who study the physical, biological, and social processes of watersheds, while a bike path through the agricultural lands provides close views of dairy operations and research on conservation and restoration of watershed processes. Research in the reach includes a wetland restoration study upstream of the covered bridge between the bike path and Oak Creek, where minor excavation helped retain winter rainwater, a wetland returned, native plants from the site's seed bank replaced pasture grasses, and ducks, geese, frogs, great blue herons, and red-winged blackbirds became common users. In the spring of 2000, after high levels of E. coli bacteria were detected in Oak Creek, a graduate student investigated a field southeast of the dairy where liquid manure is used for irrigation and where subsurface drainage installed decades earlier was designed to remove water from the soil profile. Researchers mapped drain tile networks with a cesium magnetometer and used tracers and outflow samples to show that natural drainage features such as cracks, worm holes, root channels, and mammal burrows worked together with drain tiles to transport surface water. The Agricultural Reach also supports many species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds, including Chinook salmon, cutthroat trout, Pacific lamprey, Pacific tree frogs, garter snakes, salamanders, blacktail deer, raccoons, beavers, mallard and wood ducks, herons, red-winged blackbirds, red-tailed hawks, kestrels, flickers, woodpeckers, great horned owls, and seasonal migrants such as yellow warblers.