Presenter/s: Eli Asher
Symposium Session: 2024 - 07 Key Results from Intensively Monitored Watersheds: Incorporating Lessons into Restoration Programs and Project Design
Topics covered: adaptive management and monitoring and lessons learned
ABSTRACT
Twenty years of before-after/control-impact data from Intensively Monitored Watersheds across the Pacific Coast has shown decidedly mixed results from placing large wood in streams with the aim of restoring or enhancing salmon and steelhead habitat. In watersheds where wood placement has resulted in positive fish population responses, treatments tend to have commonalities: they target limiting habitat factors, they cover a broad geographic extent, and they are intensive. The combination of extensive, intensive treatments, however, is infeasible or unaffordable for all watersheds. This talk highlights the importance of appropriately targeted, large scale, comprehensive treatments to achieve positive population responses and argues that watersheds that cannot support this level of treatment—even if habitat is the primary limiting factor—may not be good candidates for restoration.