Recently, I invested time to pursue a small Oregon grant from the Blue Sky Habitat Fund. The pool of money varies slightly from year to year, but generally is about $130,000, which typically goes to four or five award winners. The grant is funded by Pacific Power customers who choose to give a small monthly donation to the fund. The grant is administered by The Freshwater Trust. Akin to regulatory mitigation practices and in-lieu impact fees, the arrangement is a financial model to fund restoration. Here, a utility company provides funds to enhance ecosystems on which they depend for their product (i.e. an ecosystem service), and a knowledgeable NGO administers the grant to ensure effective restoration outcomes. This grant’s purpose is to create on-the-ground projects that restore and protect habitat to benefit threatened or endangered anadromous fish.
At its heart, the grant’s criteria seek to strategically target restoration projects for fish. To me, that means taking a broad view of aquatic processes and functioning of Oregon rivers, determining impairment locations and levels, and then zooming into locales with potential to make the highest impact to improve reaches for the most fish. To conduct my strategic planning, initially I focused on the following attributes known to limit at-risk populations of salmonids:
· Habitat modification (i.e. infrastructure blocking fish passage)
· High temperatures
· Insufficient flow regimes
· Low dissolved oxygen
To understand the broad view across the State, I mapped rivers known to impact fish negatively (Figure 1). To help with proposal development and justification, I obtained and compiled geospatial data from a number of high-caliber, public sources such as the Department of Environmental Quality, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and USFS’s NorWeST Stream Temperature Data.
Figure 1: Streams impaired for known limiting factors to anadromous fish species. Source: Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).
As I conducted my state-wide analysis, I targeted streams with blocked fish passages (e.g. culverts), and reaches with future predictions of low stream temperatures in 2040. My reasoning was simple: open up as many river miles into waters likely to have suitable habitat for life cycle requirements (e.g rearing and migration). Two regions popped out to me that had significant impairments: the Rogue River watershed (Figure 2) and the Wallowa mountains. Both regions are known to contain multiple threatened or endangered fish.
A key part of this grant is to have a local partner, which I liked as I wanted to both learn from them, and to be able to hand off 30% design drawings to them for on-the-ground execution. Both the Rogue and the Wallowas have strong local partnerships as evidenced by their 2019 and 2020 Focused Investment Partnerships (FIP). FIPs are funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB).
I began my networking to find local partners in the borders of established watershed councils. Before I started the process, I didn’t know anybody in either of those two communities and was only focused on salmonids and culverts. By the end of my networking, I had five local NGOs in solid discussions about which projects to do where, why, and how much they would cost. From my discussions with Applegate Partnership & Watershed Council and Lomakatsi Restoration Project, I learned that both lamprey and low-head dams were also important to address, and how local forest resilience projects can be leveraged to improve the impact of restoration efforts.
Figure 2: Significant administrative boundaries, predicted stream temperatures in 2040, and known fish barriers in the Rogue River watershed.
Due to the limited funds of this grant--and our orientation on costly in-stream infrastructure projects to fix sources of habitat modification--we are seeking opportunities for larger sources of funding. Administrative boundaries, agency mandates, and project costs need to be understood to assess project feasibility and pursue opportunities to leverage multiple funding mechanisms. The plethora of dots shown on Figure 2 indicate there is a lot to do! Currently, as a result of the pandemic, the news regarding lottery-tied sources of restoration funding for OWEB is not great. However, for some good news, Senator Wyden put to the floor of the US Senate the bill 21st Century Conservation Corps for Our Health and Our Jobs Act. In it, $9 billion dollars are proposed to aid rural economies and forested ecosystems around the country, especially those facing the risks of wildfire. With hope, the bill will pass, jobs will be created, and good projects for multiple ecosystem objectives will go forward. With some luck, my colleagues and I will be able to contribute to make the projects all the better!
