Lower Columbia River Habitat Restoration Project
Statement of Work and Budget FY2007

BPA Project Number:  2003-011-00
Contract Number:  35012
Performance/Budget Period: September 15, 2007– March 31, 2009

Contract Description
The Estuary Partnership will continue to increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and institutionalization of a habitat restoration program in the Columbia River estuary during this contract period. This effort establishes a consistent approach to project prioritization, project selection, and effectiveness monitoring. The outcome of these approaches is a coordinated, ecosystem-based restoration program that is focused on increasing the survival of juvenile salmonids and the development of an approach to monitor the effectiveness of restoration over time.  The geographic scope of this project is within the study area of the Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership (Estuary Partnership) which encompasses the lower 146 river miles of the Columbia River from Bonneville Dam to the Pacific Ocean, including the tidally-influenced portions of its tributaries.

In 2003, the Estuary Partnership was initially awarded funds from Bonneville Power Administration to implement a habitat restoration program in the lower Columbia River and estuary. The program was designed to establish an infrastructure for soliciting, developing, selecting, and funding priority restoration projects. The onset of the program coincided with the completion of the report An Ecosystem-Based Approach to Habitat Restoration Projects with Emphasis on Salmonids in the Columbia River Estuary.  The Estuary Partnership’s restoration program was designed, in part, to meet several of the recommendations of this report, most notably:

• Finalize the proposed project selection guidelines and list specific restoration projects and potential sites
• Prioritize restoration projects that promote the long-term sustainability of ecosystem function and structure at the landscape scale wherever possible
• Perform effectiveness monitoring for implemented projects and develop methods to evaluate cumulative effects of multiple projects; and
• Establish a data system for CRE habitat restoration. (Johnson et al., 2003)

The first four years of this contract included the development and implementation of the Estuary Partnership’s habitat restoration program. During this time, the Estuary Partnership established a competitive review and selection process for project proposals, refined and utilized rigorous set of project selection criteria, developed a restoration prioritization framework, and implemented 30 restoration projects that resulted in over 4,500 acres protected and/or restored and over 26 linear miles of shoreline reconnected or enhanced.  

Bonneville funding has 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 project, the Estuary Partnership developed the Lower Columbia River the Restoration Prioritization Framework for Habitat Restoration to strengthen restoration decision-making and emphasize an ecosystem-based approach to site selection. The Estuary Partnership is using the Framework to guide restoration in the estuary towards a coordinated strategy that provides the greater project certainty for success and sustainable results. As the Estuary Partnership’s experience with restoration continues to progress, restoration projects are providing a greater benefit on the health of the Columbia River system and the species for which these projects are intended to help recover.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to restoration practitioners’ lies in the inherent uncertainty of how well restoration efforts will work, particularly in as highly modified an ecosystem as the Columbia River estuary.  Due to these uncertainties, more and more projects are being designed and implemented within an adaptive management framework.  Lessons learned from experimental manipulations and monitoring within restoration projects can be applied to increase effectiveness of projects elsewhere.  This contract period will help to overcome these uncertainties by learning from existing restoration efforts, effectiveness monitoring, designing applied restoration experiments, and sharing results across numerous restoration practitioners.

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 evaluation habitat change.  Such reference sites allows for monitoring the growth, species composition, successional stage and time period of the restoration site in comparison to a reference site, and to 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 to 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 objectives to continue the process of reference site identification and characterization on a reach by reach basis.

In summary, the specific objectives of this project are to:  

(1) Continue the success of the habitat restoration program for the lower Columbia River and estuary (Bonneville Dam to mouth of river).
(2) Develop a multifaceted and broad-based adaptive management program for the lower river and estuarine habitats
(3) Identify and Characterize Reference Sites for Action Effectiveness Research and Status/Trends Monitoring in the Lower Columbia River

The outcome of these combined approaches is a restoration program that is coordinated at both a program and project level; providing a greater likelihood of sustainable project success over the long term.