The lower Columbia River and estuary is the one place in the entire system where habitat improvements will positively affect salmonids basin wide. The work to be accomplished under this contract period will continue the process of institutionalizing a habitat restoration program in the lower Columbia River and estuary.  The outcome will be a coordinated, ecosystem-based habitat restoration program, guided by an adaptive management framework and focused on increasing the survival of juvenile salmonids.

The first three years of this contract included the development and implementation of the Estuary Partnership habitat restoration program. In this time, the Estuary Partnership established a competitive review and selection process for project proposals, refined and utilized rigorous set of project selection criteria, and implemented 26 projects that resulted in over 4,500 acres protected and/or restored and over 26 linear miles of shoreline reconnected or enhanced.

In addition, these funds have supported applied research and strategic planning necessary to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of future restoration projects. During the second and third year of this contract, the Estuary Partnership developed the Lower Columbia River Restoration Prioritization Framework to strengthen restoration decision making and emphasize an ecosystem based approach. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to restoration practitioners’ lies in the inherent uncertainty of how well restoration efforts will work, particularly is as highly modified an ecosystems as the Columbia River estuary. As a result, more and more projects are being designed and implemented in an adaptive management framework. The concept of adaptive management was developed specifically to provide a framework for decision-making to help reduce uncertainty in restoration efforts.  Lessons learned from experimental manipulations restoration projects can be applied to increase the effectiveness of projects elsewhere. This contract period will help to overcome these uncertainties by learning from existing restoration efforts, through effectiveness monitoring, and by designing applied restoration experiments.

Determining the effectiveness of a restoration activity requires a comparison to a relatively unaltered reference habitat in close proximity to serve as a “control” for evaluating habitat change.  Such reference sites allows for monitoring the growth, species composition, successional stage and time period of the restoration site in comparison to the reference site and assist in developing performance standards and benchmarks for restoration activities in the estuary.  Choosing sites that include an experimental restoration design tied to effectiveness monitoring helps promote a better understanding of the relationship between habitat restoration activities and species response and performance resulting from the restoration activity.  For these reasons, we have included within this contract year an objective to begin the process for identifying and characterizing reference sites for the lower Columbia River and estuary on a reach by reach basis.

In 2006, the Estuary Partnership developed the Estuary Recovery Module for NOAA Fisheries as a planning tool to help recover salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia River basin. The Module identifies several management actions that could help to reduce stressors to these species as they migrate through the Columbia River. In particular, three actions include implementing restoration techniques to address and minimize the impacts of sediment dynamics and disposal on these fish. The implementation of these actions will require the establishment of a communication network with the Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA Fisheries, and numerous other stakeholders. For these reasons, we have included an objective to initiate this process, which will result in an implementation plan to carry out these actions and help expand the habitat restoration program into the mainstem and water column of the Columbia River and estuary.

This statement of work represents the continuation of this broad-based effort to identify and implement restoration actions to support all populations of salmon and steelhead that use the Lower Columbia River and estuary in their migration corridors. This restoration effort will continue to identify the priority areas where habitat opportunities and linkages should and can be restored to promote diverse estuarine life histories, and enhance our ability to implement projects that produce the most benefits to these populations.  

In summary, the objectives of this project are to:  

(1) Implement habitat restoration program for the lower Columbia River and estuary
(2) Develop an applied adaptive management framework for restoration projects in the lower river and estuary
(3) Identify and characterize reference sites for action effectiveness research and status/trends monitoring in the lower Columbia River
(4) Initiate implementation efforts to restore habitats by addressing factors related to sediment dynamics and sediment disposal.
(5) Continue characterization of shoreline habitat conditions
(6) Conduct outreach and proposal development for future funding cycles
(7) Implement on-the-ground projects to restore habitat for Lower Columbia River and estuary salmonids