The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) propose ongoing fish habitat protection, restoration and enhancement, maintenance, and monitoring activities under the CTUIR Grande Ronde Subbasin Restoration Project (199608300) to achieve the vision, goals, and objectives established in the Grande Ronde Subbasin Plan (NPCC, 2004) and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NPCC) Fish and Wildlife Program (NPPC 2000).  The Project plans, designs, implements, maintains, and monitors habitat protection, enhancement and restoration projects in the Subbasin with a primary goal of protecting high quality habitat and restoring/enhancing degraded habitats to support the recovery of focal species, including Threatened Snake River spring-summer Chinook salmon and summer steelhead.  

In FY 2010, the Project will focus on implementing the Dark Canyon/Meadow Creek, Cuhna Fish Habitat Enhancement Project and enhancement on the McCoy Meadows Restoration Project.  Project development and planning for 2010-2012 project activities will be ongoing with initial site survey and conceptual project planning on several potential project areas in the Upper Grande Ronde and Catherine Creek watersheds.  In addition to these activities, project staff will conduct annual project maintenance and monitoring/evaluation.

CTUIR staff will conduct a watershed assessment to classify all stream segments in the Grande Ronde Subbasin from its headwaters downstream and include the Wenaha Watershed using spatially explicit data techniques developed from a suite of non-parametric statistical models.  By building a comprehensive database of all stream segments, we expect to inform our hypotheses that drive specific restoration projects.  We will model spatially extensive physical processes using existing 10 meter DEMs and 1:24,000 scale stream data sets that provide continuous values for several important hydrologic and geomorphic parameters.  To address varying spatial thresholds in these processes, we will develop a multi-scale classification to characterize physical processes for the watershed.   The focus of work is to characterize essential habitats for critical salmonid life stages, gain further insight into the scales of physical processes that support those habitats in key channel reaches, and predict the spatial patterns of physical and aquatic diversity across several watersheds (~ 30,000 sq. km area).


A budget of $604,238 is requested to perform watershed restoration-related tasks associated with several project areas.  Funds provided under this contract are utilized to conduct pre-project planning, administration, project maintenance, monitoring and evaluation, as well as developing cost-share proposals to support restoration project implementation from various sources.