Riparian Corridor Condition Matters More Than Acreage Total

I used to evaluate land purchases almost entirely on total acreage and price per acre. Made complete sense to me until I helped a friend walk a 180-acre parcel in the Missouri River hills that looked gorgeous on paper. The creek corridor running through it was an absolute disaster — entrenched channel, bare banks, wall-to-wall Japanese knotweed and reed canary grass for a quarter mile in both directions. She bought it anyway because the upland acres were priced right. Five years later, she's spent more money on that creek corridor than she ever imagined, and she'll be fighting those invasives for the rest of her life. The upland restoration she dreamed about keeps getting postponed because the riparian zone bleeds resources constantly. Now I tell everyone: a compromised creek corridor is a permanent tax on everything else you want to do with that land. Walk every foot of stream bank before you make an offer, and treat heavy invasive pressure there as a serious price negotiation point. Does anyone factor riparian condition into their offer math, or do most buyers still treat it as a secondary concern?