Grande Ronde Model Watershed plants seeds for waterway renewal

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Grande Ronde Model Watershed plants seeds for waterway renewal

August 19, 2024

Through restoration efforts, the watershed at Catherine Creek has seen a significant increase in main channel length and floodplain connectivity. Photo by Nick Quinata, BPA Communications.

The Grande Ronde Model Watershed is leading the charge to restore natural habitats for fish, wildlife and native plants in the Grande Ronde River Basin.

The Grande Ronde watershed, a tributary to the Snake River, at one time supported robust populations of Snake River spring Chinook salmon, summer steelhead, and a host of native fishery and wildlife resources. Habitat degradation, local developments and overfishing have contributed to a significant decline in these native resources, leading these fish species to be threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act.

To address this urgent problem, the Grande Ronde Model Watershed (GRMW), a nonprofit organization, is leading the charge to restore healthy rivers and the diverse species that inhabit them.

GRMW, with funding from the Bonneville Power Administration, local tribes, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, nonprofits and many others, is strategically combining unique methods of restoration across the Grande Ronde River to facilitate growth of healthy river habitats and sustain them well into the future.

Established in 1992, the GRMW is meant to serve as a positive example of the benefits that establishing watershed management programs can provide to residents, state and federal agencies, non-profit organizations and public interest groups.

The Grande Ronde River Basin, including its tributaries and traditional floodplain areas such as Sheep Creek, Catherine Creek (Saxsaaxinma) and Bird Track Springs, are essential waterways for Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, and Pacific lamprey. The Grande Ronde River also serves as home to species like elk, deer and beavers.

The river basin supports plant life essential for sustaining life throughout the region, including wetland-loving grasses and shrubs that harbor insects and, in turn, sustain food sources for fish. These wetlands are meant to be flooded annually, becoming floodplains, or areas of land connected by ground and surface waters year-round to produce access ways for fish and habitats for hundreds of wildlife species.

Floodplain systems provide ideal resting habitats in the form of deep, cold-water pools created by boulders, logs, beaver dams and other habitat features in the streams that slow water, spread it out and create variations in depths. However, due to human interference since the early 19th century that sought to control, minimize or eliminate seasonal flooding, the watershed has seen the destruction of important species.

Allen Childs, project leader and fish habitat biologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), says that these practices were left largely unchecked throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, causing harm to these important watersheds. The GRMW and its partners are working to reverse decades of harmful human interference.

"By the time we got to the 1900s, the watershed was severely degraded," Childs said. An influx of ranching, namely cattle and sheep grazing in the early 1840s, led tributaries such as Sheep Creek and areas close to La Grande, Oregon, to be channelized, which disrupted the creeks' natural tendency to flow in many channels. Additionally, historic land use activities such as gold mining, splash dam logging, road and railroad construction, and other reasons for channelization contributed to alteration of the watershed. Loss of riparian and wetland vegetation, pool habitat, and overall complexity contributed to the decline of habitat suitable to support cold water fish.

One harmful impact of channelization is apparent when waterways become wider and shallower over time, especially in summer months, allowing water in the stream to be more easily heated by the sun. This phenomenon, combined with the loss of natural river features like wood that generate deep river pools, creates uninhabitable temperatures for migrating fish.

The efforts for restoration and conservation that the GRMW facilitates largely began with CTUIR and many different tribes, who have treaty rights to fish and gather natural resources in the area. The restoration of salmon and steelhead habitats are also essential to these tribes for their cultural significance, as these foods are outlined in tribal First Foods practices.

CTUIR habitat rehabilitation programs began in the late 1980s with the efforts of the Watershed Council, a committee of conservationists aimed at restoring a healthy watershed.

"When a lot of this work started with the watershed councils and CTUIR, it took a number of years to get the projects underway," says Childs. The establishment of GRMW shifted the focus to channel morphology, or working to achieve cooler, deep pool habitats in channels where fish are active.

Restoring waterways by adding boulders and logs to rivers, and through practices like placing gravel and mimicking natural features like beaver dams, produces small, slow-moving spaces and pools in streams and floodplains.

The fruits of these long-term restoration efforts are already apparent, with floodplain acreage and deep pool habitats increasing dramatically at projects sites like Sheep Creek. The Sheep Creek restoration project, overseen mainly by Trout Unlimited, is to continue over the next four years, at the end of which project managers hope to see a much more thriving, healthy habitat. The team implementing these changes includes heavy machinery operators, numerous volunteers, and a U.S. veterans-based hand crew, who are working to diversify restoration techniques.

The watershed efforts at Bird Track Springs have increased the inundated flood plain area by 100 acres. The number of deep pools for fish habitat restoration has increased from one to 63 since CTUIR fish habitat restoration efforts began there in 2017. With these improvements in place, GRMW and its partners are confident that the Grande Ronde's tributaries and floodplains will see more positive growth in the near future.

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