Kootenai River Restoration
Restore Natural Recruitment, Kootenai River White Sturgeon
(Project #200200200)

Project Overview and Context
Project (#200200200) is a collaborative effort led by the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho and includes multiple federal agencies, state agencies, and other stakeholders and is funded by Bonneville Power Administration through the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program.  

This project complements and is part of a suite of Kootenai River Ecosystem Adaptive Management Program projects being implemented or planned for implementation by the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, agencies, and other many other entities.

The project is intended to contribute to Kootenai sturgeon recovery by addressing the underlying physical habitat conditions and ecological processes required for successful natural recruitment.

Project is consistent with Kootenai Tribe of Idaho’s approach to fish and wildlife management which places emphasis on: holistic approaches (i.e., operate on a watershed scale), defensible science, collaboration, inclusive of social and economic issues, maintaining local community support, and encouraging adaptive management.

Related Tribal fish and wildlife projects include: Kootenai River White Sturgeon Conservation Aquaculture; Research and Monitoring and Evaluation; Ecosystem Improvements (river and lake productivity); Tributary Restoration and Kokanee Reintroduction; Burbot Recovery Strategy; USGS River Modeling; Operational Loss Assessment; Feasibility of Reconnecting Sloughs and Side Channels.

Project Goals and Objectives

Project Goals:

- Restore natural recruitment of endangered Kootenai River White Sturgeon and the underlying physical habitat conditions and ecological processes required for successful natural recruitment.
- Restore and maintain Kootenai River habitat conditions that support all life stages of endangered Kootenai River White Sturgeon (i.e., migration, occupancy, spawning, incubation, recruitment and early rearing).  
- Restore and enhance Kootenai River ecosystem resilience (e.g., increase habitat complexity and diversity, restore and maintain biological diversity, improve channel and floodplain interaction, create normative river conditions that are stable and self-maintaining).

Project Objectives:

- Restore, enhance and support resilience in the river ecosystem
    - Adjust the dimension, pattern, and profile of the river in the project area to match current flow, hydraulic, and sediment transport regimes resulting from the construction and operation of Libby Dam.
    - Improve the channel and floodplain interaction for proper fluvial, biological and ecological functions (includes riparian and wetland functions, nutrients)
    - Reduce land loss associated with current erosion and flowing.
    - Increase instream habitat complexity.
    - Provide a stable, self-maintaining habitat restoration project (i.e., ability to maintain project’s desired engineered, biological, and ecological conditions over time in the face of post-construction empirical environmental variability) to benefit endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon and other aquatic life.

- Address depth, velocity, and turbulence requirements for Kootenai River white sturgeon
    - Provide and maintain physical habitat (bathymetric and hydraulic) characteristics suitable for migration, occupancy, spawning, incubation, and/or early rearing of endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon.

- Address substrate conditions, stream channel, sediment transport
    - Provide the capacity to transport the annual sediment load resulting in suitable spawning, incubation and rearing habitats for endangered white sturgeon.
    - Provide a habitat restoration project design that transports the sediment load from the upstream condition and coarsen the bed material size distribution where possible.
    - Provide the competence for sediment transport (ability to move the larger clast sizes).
    - Reduce fine sediment erosion from the river banks and levees.

- Test recruitment failure hypothesis
    - Provide increased river depth and velocity profiles to test hypothesis of current upstream migration and current braided reach habitat use limitations for various life stages of endangered white sturgeon.

- Address legal requirements
    - Provide restored/functional habitat conditions for various purposes consistent with recovery and federal hydropower system operation criteria in the various recovery plans, Biological Opinion, and other relevant state, federal or provincial plans and legislation.

- Do no harm (and if possible provide ancillary benefits)
    - Protect the bridge piers and foundations for the state Hwy 95 and railroad bridges for proper (non-eroding) fluvial function.
    - Reduce flood frequency by changing the current post-dam stage-discharge relationship.
    - Reduce flood levels…or do not increase flood levels based on the proposed design.