Gadgetory

Sandy River is one of the most prominent features of Oregon it served as a source of drinking water and recreational fishing for generations a coho salmon and steelhead trout were abundant in the river and its tributaries but historic floods and River manipulation endangered about a dozen native species conservationists group the freshwater trust is using cutting-edge laser technology in its effort to restore the damaged ecosystem and after decades of displacement salmon and steelhead are finding their way home the reason that we're here doing River restoration is because for like thirty forty fifty sixty years they've been clearing out the large wood out of the stream for various reasons to reduce with the idea of reducing floods collecting firewood they've been doing timber harvest in this area and that that also stops back in the 1980s and so since then we've been doing stream restoration in this area and what happens is when you remove these roughness elements from the system the the river responds by getting shorter and straighter and as you get shorter and straighter you have more energy and as it has more energy it tends to down cut and become further removed from the floodplain and what we really want is the water out on the floodplain because that gives us the habitat complexity and diversity that juvenile salmon steelhead need River restoration requires topographic surveys traditionally watersheds have been examined on foot but freshwater trust uses lidar or light detection and ranging an infrared laser that provides three-dimensional details of the land this remote sensing technology creates a detailed map of the watershed which enables them to find restoration sites from a distance once we've collected lidar data via remote sensing from the office you could essentially see all the historic meander patterns and it really accelerated our ability to find the side channels and figure out how they should work as a system in haul currently the river is this angry river coming off the mountain going straight down the mountain very low sanyasa t large cobbles and boulders not very much spawning gravel very simple stream and what we're trying to do is make it complex today we are actually tipping over whole trees to give us that instrument so with a very low risk that infrastructure we can kick water out onto the floodplain and essentially let nature decide where it wants the side channel or off-channel habitats and be a little bit like Christmas morning right now you don't know what you're gonna so the project objective here was to add whole trees to restore floodplain connectivity on this river Left floodplain right now you're looking down at a secondary channel the trees three trees got pulled over they bridge the secondary channel landed down in the main channel and carried across the floodplain when we get high water events next winter the water is going to come down this main channel get kicked out of the main channel by these three pieces of large wood we just added and AD habitat over there on the floodplain some people come out here and say oh this is the most beautiful stream ever seen when you're looking at from a fish's eye is a very simple habitat and so using limited resources and the challenges that come with that and going out here and creating to me what feels like a magical place for fish it's just extremely rewarding you know I love seeing the habitat in biological response that we'll get out of these projects I mean one thing that's really unique about this is that applied restoration it's pretty good at going out there and getting the habitat response that that you want to get whether it's recruiting large wood whether it's recruiting gravels what's really neat about salmon and still Creek is that there's enough productivity in the salmon and steelhead that will open a side channel in weeks later it'll fill a juvenile fish will create a main stem pool or a log jam on the main stem salmon recruit gravels that winter and then the following spring will have winter steelhead spawning in it so they immediately see that biological response it's tremendously rewarding