Background of Our Work | Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership

Background on Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership Work


	In This Section:

	Mission and Vision Background Steering Committee Other Partnerships


	Additional background resources:

	PCWP Update 2000 PCWP Update 2001 USFS PCWP Annual Report 2001 PCWP Update 2002 USFS PCWP Annual Report 2002

History
In March of 1999 the United States Forest Service Leadership Conference highlighted water and watersheds as the issue of the decade. They agreed that focused, integrated efforts would be necessary for successful restoration of watersheds. To implement the concepts, they requested that National Forests and Research Stations throughout the United States submit proposals for large-scale watershed restoration demonstration areas.

As a result of that request, proposals from the Siuslaw and Siskiyou National Forests and the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area were combined with a proposal from Ducks Unlimited for restoration of Pacific Northwest Coastal Estuaries. This combination of proposals initiated the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership, which is now one of fifteen Large Scale Watershed Restoration Demonstration Projects sponsored by the Forest Service throughout the United States. Ducks Unlimited was instrumental in aiding the passage of the appropriations bill that provided funding for all 15 Large-Scale Watershed Restoration and Protection Demonstration Projects. The Olympic, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie, and Umpqua National Forests have all joined the partnership, stretching the partnership from the Canadian to the Californian border. Individuals from many state and federal agencies along with private and volunteer groups have been working together to shape the concept of the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership since 1999 and renewed their partnership in 2003 with an updated strategy.

The Strategy
The following excerpts come from the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership's (PCWP) business plan, which was completed in 2000 and describes the purpose of establishing the partnership. The entire business plan can be found on the page www.fs.fed.us/largewatershedprojects/businessplans

There is a need to focus on watershed restoration efforts. There is a need to demonstrate that watershed restoration will bring about recovery of threatened and endangered species. The Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership (PCWP) will provide the focus necessary to bring about aquatic species recovery. The strategy involves selecting a group of watersheds, spread throughout the coastal areas of Oregon and Washington, which together will provide a refuge system from which species recovery can occur. The watersheds will be selected through a scientific process that involves evaluation of biological and physical integrity as well as incorporating areas where significant investments have already been made toward protecting and restoring watershed conditions. The selected watersheds will have the potential to produce high quality salmon and trout habitat for species recovery. Ultimately, they will provide the strongholds of salmon and trout populations that will seed other areas as populations increase. As restoration is completed in the initial set of watershed in the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership, adjacent areas will be prioritized to continue the focused restoration strategy. Through the involvement of key funding and decision-making agencies in the selection process, there will be commitment to focus funds and personnel to facilitate the necessary high priority restoration in these few critical areas.

Two key goals of the original strategy that remain consistent with the partnership's vision:

1. Secure adequate funds to ensure truly integrated restoration across ownerships within individual watersheds, providing more returns on individual project investment.
2. Create a network of watersheds throughout the coastal areas of Oregon and Washington to form one refuge system that integrates projects from across the coast into one large-scale project.

A key component of the Pacific Coast Watershed Partnership is the involvement of the Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station. Their primary goal is to develop tools to help determine priority areas for watershed restoration efforts that will assist in the recovery of habitat for declining salmon populations in coastal Oregon and Washington. Specific objectives are:

1. Develop Geographic Information System models to identify watersheds with the greatest inherent potential to produce fish.
2. Develop procedures to prioritize watersheds for restoration efforts and to identify the conditions in a given watershed that should be addressed in a restoration effort.
3. Develop projections of possible future changes in watershed and salmon and trout habitat condition across all ownerships under current policies.
4. Estimate costs of easements for restoration on private land in watershed identified for restoration.
5. Develop monitoring programs to evaluate the effectiveness of restoration efforts.

To accomplish these objectives, we will take advantage of work of the Coastal Landscape Analysis and Modeling Study (CLAMS) that is evaluating effects of forest policies at province scales in the Oregon Coast Range. CLAMS is a joint research project of the PNW Research Station, Oregon State University, and the Oregon Department of Forestry. We will use databases and models developed in CLAMS to evaluate the inherent potential small watersheds to produce salmon (Objective 1). This evaluation will depend primarily on the geology and landscape features of the watersheds (e.g., gradient, valley width, etc.) and will initially not consider ownership or land-use. We will then prioritize these watersheds with regards to which would be the best for restoration efforts (Objective 2). To do this we will develop a decision support model that considers such things as which watershed conditions need to be addressed, economic costs, and ownership patterns. We will be able to project future conditions of the watershed and the habitat within it using models developed in CLAMS (Objective 3). This will allow managers and decision makers to make initial evaluations of restoration to see if desired results are likely to be achieved. We will enlist the assistance of economists at Oregon State University, to evaluate the economic consequences of proposed restoration efforts on private lands (Objective 4). We will explore possible ways of off-setting costs to private land owners so that economic costs are minimized. The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board has offered to contribute half of the cost for this objective. Monitoring programs will follow what is being proposed for the aquatic-riparian component of the Northwest Forest Plan (Objective 5).

Completed Projects
A variety of projects have been completed in the Skagit, Dungeness, Lower Columbia, Siuslaw, and Coquille watersheds with funding received from the PCWP. In three years, the partnership has restored 12,300 acres of key wetlands, estuaries, riparian areas, and upland habitats. 175 projects have been completed in five priority watersheds, and these represent only a fraction of what the individual watershed partnerships achieved. For example, the Dungeness River Management Team, in partnership with the Olympic National Forest, has restored and protected an additional X acres. The public-private partnership in the Siuslaw basin has been monitoring fish production for over twenty years, and their partnership has been internationally recognized as one of the top five watershed projects in the world. The Umpqua National Forest has completed an excellent, prioritized assessment of their sub-basins and has been working on restoring their top priority basins as fast and efficiently as their funding permits. Ducks Unlimited has restored thousands of acres of wetlands in key coastal basins and in estuaries in between key basins, providing critical habitat throughout the coastal Pacific flyway. The Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest helped the Skagit Watershed Council develop an implementation monitoring plan and is providing hands-on educational opportunities for local school children. The Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest is working with its partners in the Coquille Watershed Association to eliminate all fish passage barriers, while placing a high priority on local issues and public input. These projects and more are described in detail under the On the Ground page on this website.


By keeping a presence, the FISHWATCH Program on the N. Umpqua River helps protect spring chinook salmon and fall steelhead.


Edison School working in the Siuslaw Basin


Forest Service and community partners reviewing restoration project on Little Rock Creek.