Siuslaw Watershed Restoration Initiative
Selected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as one of fourteen Targeted Watersheds under the 2004 Watershed Initiative, The Siuslaw Watershed Restoration Initiative (SWRI) will develop and implement a whole-basin watershed monitoring and evaluation project that tracks restoration and conservation progress across ownership and over time. The SWRI focuses on the dynamics of water, sediment, and organic matter moving from the ridge-tops through the stream system and out the estuary.
The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians provided our guiding restoration philosophy: to naturally restore the watershed processes of the Siuslaw watershed. The SWRI focuses on the dynamics of water, sediment, and organic matter moving from the ridge-tops through the stream system and out the estuary.
We will implement a whole-basin restoration initiative that improves the health and vitality of water resources using the five following strategies:
- Restore natural landscape processes in the uplands
- Use market incentives to reduce the risk of sediment delivery to stream channels on public and private land;
- Evaluate the effects of tree planting efforts in riparian areas;
- Protect and restore a five-mile estuary corridor; and
- Develop and implement a water quality and watershed processes monitoring and evaluation program.
The 773 square mile Siuslaw River Basin is located on the Central Oregon Coast with a river distance of nearly 150 miles running from the edge of the Willamette Valley to the Pacific Ocean at Florence, OR. The watershed is listed as having impaired water quality for both temperature and sediment. While our monitoring program addresses those issues, the context of our plan is broader and includes physical, chemical, and biological parameters.
In the Siuslaw watershed, the dominant process moving sediment and organic matter from the ridge tops to streams is debris flows (masses of logs, rock, soil and water, which careen down tributary streams during floods). Changes in the dynamics of debris flows have contributed in the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality listing the Siuslaw basin as temperature and sediment impaired. With funds from the EPA, we will implement a whole-basin restoration initiative that improves the health and vitality of water resources in the Siuslaw River Watershed.
The Siuslaw Watershed Restoration Initiative is a partnership project between Ecotrust, the Siuslaw Watershed Council (SWC), the Siuslaw Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD), the Siuslaw Institute (SI), and the Siuslaw National Forest (SNF). Ecotrust and the four Siuslaw-based organizations have a long-standing partnership, working together to restore and monitor the Siuslaw watershed for the past decade, most recently completing a whole-basin watershed assessment. Ecotrust serves as the grantee and project manager, working with representatives from the partner organizations.
Currently, no plan exists in the Pacific Northwest that can successfully monitor the water quality in a fourth order basin for the physical, chemical, and biological components of the Clean Water Act. However, there are many on-the-ground restoration implementation projects underway, successfully completed, or currently planned for the Siuslaw, making this watershed an excellent choice around which to build such a monitoring plan. The Siuslaw Initiative focuses on the effects of these restoration efforts and changes to land-use practices on landscape level processes that move water, sediment, and organic matter from the ridge tops to the ocean. It is this movement of material that creates the physical habitats and organic matter storage that controls many of the aspects of water quality.
Request for Proposals: For Contract Services in the Siuslaw Basin (5k pdf)
