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Oregon Sea Grant's Experience with Watershed Restoration Goes National
By John Baur
If salmon cannot adapt to the human world - and indeed it looks as if they can't - humans will have to adapt to the salmon's if we want the fish to once again flourish.
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Chinook salmon |
Local efforts to save Oregon's native salmon runs by restoring their habitat are becoming a model for national watershed restoration efforts.
To the people of the Pacific Northwest, the salmon is more than a fish. It's symbolic of the region's self-perception of its pioneer heritage and close-to-nature lifestyle, a powerful totem to native peoples and a mainstay of the fishing economy.
But in the last decades of the 20th century, the symbol changed. Overfishing, changing land development patterns and a host of little-understood natural changes have turned the once-abundant fish into a symbol of scarcity.
A decline in salmon numbers actually was first noted officially in the 1890s, but since the late 1970s those numbers have dropped sharply, raising the specter of imminent extinction for many native populations. NOAA's Marine Fisheries Service has declared several population groups of salmon threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
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Pristine streams like this one in Oregon's Coast Range are the spawning grounds for endangered salmon. |
Oregon Sea Grant's Extension agents and specialists have been at the heart of an increasingly intense effort to understand and reverse the salmon decline, restoring the species to ecological health and sustainable harvest levels.
Early efforts to aid the fish took what might be called a "mechanical" approach. As dams went up on the region's waterways and human development encroached more and more on the land, attempts were made to help fish live with these changes. Fish ladders were installed in dams, hatcheries built to supplement natural fish runs.
In essence, this approach sought to make the fish adapt to man-made intrusions in the natural habitat. The result over the course of the 20th century was a dramatic decline in native fish numbers.
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Paul Heikkila, Extension Sea Grant agent for Coos County, plants willow saplings to stabilize a riverbank in the Coquille watershed. |
More recent efforts, led by Extension Sea Grant (ESG) agents, focus on restoring the habitat to one in which the fish can flourish. If salmon cannot adapt to the human world - and indeed it looks as if they can't - humans will have to adapt to the salmon's if we want the fish to once again flourish.
Sea Grant's goal has not been to do a lot of rehabilitation - there aren't nearly enough funds to do all that is necessary - but to teach people how to do it in their own communities. In that respect, the program has been a success.
Nine extension faculty affiliated with Oregon Sea Grant have provided a wealth of information, training and consultation for the watershed councils which are the backbone of the state's Plan for Salmon and Watersheds. From early efforts to get organized, through on-the-ground habitat restoration work and landowner education, ESG agents provide a local connection to university resources. Oregon Sea Grant and the Extension Service created the Watershed Stewardship Education Program, which is helping local citizens and watershed groups implement the Oregon Plan.
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Oregon's Elk River meanders through the misty watershed. |
The Watershed Stewardship Education Program (WSEP), in collaboration with Oregon State University (OSU) Extension Forestry staff, has developed a curriculum to help local councils form effective partnerships, understand their watersheds, and develop strategies for enhancing or restoring them.
In turn, WSEP has grown into a national Sea Grant program under the National Outreach Initiative. This joint program of the Oregon, New York and Louisiana Sea Grant programs will make the educational material developed for WSEP available to programs across the country.
According to Tara Nierenberg, OSU coordinator of WSEP, about 1,000 people have gone through the training program in the three years since it was established.
Five to seven training programs have been offered each year. The eight modules of the session focus on different aspects of watershed rehabilitation, with an indoor and field portion for each module. Participants learn by working on actual projects, and their efforts are tracked by ESG once they return to their own areas.
Although watershed council members are the primary audience of the sessions, participants also include teachers, farmers, foresters and individuals interested in aiding the local environment.
For 2002, she is hoping to offer 10 training sessions.
The success of WSEP led to the three-state program to extend the program's reach across the country.
Pat Corcoran is an Extension Sea Grant community development specialist working on the National Outreach Initiative publication. When the work is published by Oregon Sea Grant - probably in late winter or early spring of 2002 - people interested in watershed restoration will have an important tool to use.
It won't be a blueprint, he hastened to add, not a step-by-step guide to rehabilitating a watershed. But it will provide the tools for groups to use in creating their own plans.
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Fisheries biologists sample salmon populations in an Oregon stream. |
"What they do is their own blueprint. What this does is provide a watershed perspective and how to apply various scientific tools in that context," he explained.
The Oregon Sea Grant publication, the National Coastal Ecosystem Restoration Manual, will take Oregon's success and "de-Oregonize" it, make it applicable to a national audience. It will encourage local groups to use the best available science in their projects and provide plenty of that information, plus a listing of resources where more information is available.
Finally, the document will supply a guide to incorporating effective group processes, Corcoran said, including discussions of how decisions are made, conversational skills, conflict resolution and meeting management.
Oregon Sea Grant also has focused its salmon outreach efforts on helping fishing families and communities.
Since the mid-1990s, Extension Sea Grant agents and specialists have worked with such groups as the Women's Coalition for Pacific Fisheries to identify and serve the changing needs of fishing families, their small businesses and the communities in which they live. The Fishing Families Project resulted in workshops, newsletters, and more than a dozen publications targeting fishing family and business concerns. Outreach efforts continue, through the Heads Up! Web site (http://www.heads-up.net/) and collaboration with the WCPF and other groups.
The Sea Grant Communications office produces Restoration, a quarterly newsletter that goes to 1,300 subscribers throughout the region and covers the science, politics, and philosophy of watershed and species restoration. Additional products have included videos, fact sheets, public opinion surveys, and other publications addressing restoration issues from ecological, scientific and cultural perspectives. More information on these and other communications products is at seagrant.orst.edu.
All photos by Oregon Sea Grant
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Oregon Sea Grant works to further knowledge of the marine and coastal environments of the Pacific Northwest, and the forces – natural and human – that shape their destiny. From that knowledge, it is hoped, will come better understanding of the complex biologic, geologic, social, and economic forces that shape the region, and better stewardship of its resources. |
[12/17/01]
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