The Grande Ronde Model Watershed is the primary entity coordinating habitat restoration in the Grande Ronde Basin.  Under this technical assessment contract GRMW will work with local and regional partners, along with consultants to complete a number of assessments that will inform future restoration implementation and action effectiveness.  GRMW will coordinate the efforts and provide project management and oversight.  Assessments include:

- Sediment Budget/Analysis in the upper Grande Ronde (UGR) River subbasin
- Professional Surveys for Ground Control Points for SUAS imagery
- Development of a Habitat Suitability Index Tool to inform restoration project design
- Assessment of a large scale stage-0 floodplain restoration project
- Water Quality Assessment in the Grande Ronde Valley
- LiDAR Evaluation - Grande Ronde Basin
- Hydraulic and Habitat HEC-RAS Evaluation

The sediment budget in the upper Grande Ronde will help determine the best restoration actions to be implemented in the UGR watershed.  There is concern that sediment supply, transport and deposition have been severely altered due to historic dredge mining, splash dam logging and land management.  A sediment budget will help identify and quantify sources of sediment, the rivers current sediment transport ability and sediment deposition areas.  Several restoration projects in the UGR are dependent upon sediment aggrading on and around wood structures to achieve objectives.  This assessment will inform adaptive management of these projects and future restoration projects.  GRMW will contract with Wolfe Water Resources to help complete this assessment.

GRMW will contract with Anderson Perry and Associates to complete professional grade survey of 150 ground control points (GCP).  These GCPs will be used to georectify aerial orthomosaics.  Aerial imagery once georectified will be used for implementation verification, project reporting, project planning and development and remote sensed monitoring.

GRMW is contracting with Cramer Fish Sciences to complete a Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) tool.  This tool will be developed in R-script and be capable of processing large batches of data to identify current and proposed habitat suitability.  The tool will be able to process hydraulic model data (depth and velocity) using various habitat suitability curves.  This tool, once developed will be used by GRMW and made available to partners for their use as well.

GRMW will contract with Cramer Fish Sciences to help plan, implement and assess the benefits of a large scale (2 miles) floodplain restoration project in the UGR.  Dr. Phil Roni will assist the partners in identifying project objectives, restoration actions, and assessment methods, both on the ground and through remote sensing.

GRMW will contract with a water quality consultant to complete water quality sampling in the Grande Ronde valley.  Juvenile Chinook salmon and steelhead experience higher mortality rates in the Grande Ronde valley than neighboring populations of Chinook and steelhead.  This assessment will be used to try and determine how much of a factor water quality and toxins may be contributing to that mortality and then identify management actions to address any water quality concerns.

GRMW and CRITFC will contract with Quantum Spatial (QSI) to acquire topobathymetric LiDAR within the Grande Ronde Basin.  QSI will collect the data via fixed wing aircraft and establish ground control points (GCP) using professional grade survey equipment.  QSI will process the LiDAR, deliver point clouds, rasters, vectors and a final report.  These LiDAR data will be used to plan and design restoraiton projects as well and develop HEC-RAS models.

GRMW will work collaboratively with a team of engineers from BPA, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Kleinschmidt and Associates to study the application of hydraulic engineering in fisheries habitat restoration with specific emphasis on the hydraulic modeling of Next Gen LWD projects. BPA’s current approach is the application of roughness polygons to represent structure footprints and increase the Manning’s N roughness coefficients. Results of this methodology have generated potentially anomalous results for shear stress and stream power output that have led to questions on how RAS is handling this with the modified N approach. The goal of this study will be to apply an integrated team approach to define best practices for 2D RAS modeling of LWD habitat structures so that BPA can prescribe required approaches across the dozens of projects we encounter - review assist on a year.  The team will use an example project from the Grande Ronde Basin to test modeling methods.

These assessments will benefits GRMW, BPA and partners in their continued efforts to restore tributary habitat for threatened salmon and steelhead populations in the Grande Ronde Basin.