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Collaborating to Identify Salmon Habitat Restoration Priorities in California Watersheds
NOAA Fisheries and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife are implementing a collaborative process called SHaRP (Salmon Habitat Restoration Priorities) to identify priority actions for restoring California’s salmon and steelhead habitat.
Chinook salmon in California. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Restoring Habitat for California Salmon and Steelhead
Across the West Coast region, 28 populations of salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Habitat loss and degradation are primary factors in their decline. In California, nearly 90 percent of wetlands—crucial habitat for salmon—have been lost due to habitat destruction, spurred by a booming population and economic development.
NOAA Fisheries works with state and local partners in California to rebuild populations of salmon and steelhead through habitat restoration. Our work helps to undo damage done to coastal wetlands and streams. We restore habitat that these fish use for feeding, spawning, and refuge. Working with our partners, we reconnect marshes and floodplains to tidal waters, rehabilitate stream habitat, and improve fish passage in streams by removing dams or replacing undersized culverts.
Identifying Restoration Needs at the Stream Scale
Existing state and federal recovery plans have identified numerous short and long-term actions needed to rebuild populations of salmon and steelhead (collectively known as salmonids) in California. These non-regulatory documents serve as road maps for species recovery—each plan outlines the path and tasks required to restore and secure self-sustaining wild populations.
Recovery plans in California for salmonids are relatively broad in scope. They often cover a large geographic area, because they address recovery needs throughout a species’ range. They also identify numerous recovery actions that may take decades to complete.
Habitat restoration projects, on the other hand, often happen at a smaller spatial scale, such as a single site or a portion of a waterway. It also typically has a shorter planning horizon of up to 10 years. While recovery plans focus on a single species, habitat restoration projects are often designed to benefit multiple species at the same time.
The vast extent of habitat restoration that is needed and the broad scope of recovery plans can often lead to dispersed, unconnected habitat restoration projects that are spread out across the landscape. Each individual project helps improve conditions at a local scale, but this project-by-project approach may miss the larger benefits that come from comprehensive, watershed-scale restoration efforts. Additionally, the restoration actions may not be focused in locations that are most important for salmonid recovery.
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This habitat restoration project involved placing large wood debris in a stream channel to create winter habitat for coho salmon. Credit: California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Collaborative Identification of Habitat Problems and Solutions
SHaRP (Salmon Habitat Restoration Priorities) is a collaborative, consensus-based process to determine the most pressing habitat restoration actions needed to recover salmonids in a focus area (such as one or more streams or rivers). SHaRP builds on the broader restoration actions described in recovery plans by identifying specific locations within those streams and rivers where habitat restoration actions can best improve conditions for salmon and steelhead. The result is a targeted strategy that has the level of detail practitioners need to prioritize, plan, and implement meaningful habitat restoration projects.
SHaRP reflects a “protect the best” approach. It focuses on restoring healthier parts of the river, where habitat is not completely degraded and salmon and steelhead are doing relatively well. Over time, experts anticipate that more salmonids will spawn in the restored parts, which will ultimately repopulate other, more degraded parts of the river.
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Participants engage in a discussion during the South Fork Eel River SHaRP process. Credit: NOAA Fisheries.
NOAA Fisheries and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) developed the SHaRP process and both agencies play a key role in its implementation across the state; contributing expert knowledge about salmon and steelhead, their habitat needs, and effective restoration approaches.
The success of SHaRP depends on community and tribal participation. Creating these highly-specific restoration strategies requires deep, local understanding. The people who live and work in the region, and who have spent time studying or observing a particular area, have key insights in identifying the most pressing problems facing salmon and steelhead habitat, the best forms of habitat restoration to address those problems, and specific locations where this restoration should happen.
The SHaRP process includes the following steps. Together, these strategies form the overall SHaRP strategy for the identified streams and rivers:
Selecting focus areas. Participants identify focus areas within the identified streams and rivers that have the greatest potential to support healthy salmonids.
Understanding the context and conditions of each focus area. People with knowledge and experience of each focus area come together to discuss historical information (such as past land use practices) and available data and observations of the current condition of salmonids and aquatic habitat there.
Identifying habitat problems and solutions within each focus area. The same group identifies the habitat problems that most limit salmon and steelhead within each focus area, then describes the fine-scale restoration solutions for each habitat issue. This work is described in that focus area’s restoration strategy.
Each application of SHaRP may be different, because the physical conditions, size and scale of the planning areas, and extent of previous planning efforts varies across the state. However, each process will be guided by the same set of seven SHaRP “pillars” described below:
Strength: Identify the areas where salmonids are doing best and prioritize restoration in those areas.
Focus and scale: Focus resources on areas and treatments with the greatest impact, at a fine geographic scale.
Community: Create and implement plans with the engagement of community members who have local knowledge of the watershed.
Agency alignment: Ensure the deep involvement of NOAA Fisheries and CDFW in the process, to assure the community that the agencies agree with the need for projects identified in the plan.
Multi-species: Consider all threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead occurring in a watershed.
Science: Use sound science, including local knowledge, to drive decisions.
Decision: Make decisions based on the best information available at the time, learning and adapting along the way.
SHaRP Across California
SHaRP plans are being developed and implemented in the following areas:
Aerial view of restored floodplain habitat and agricultural property near Sacramento, California.
Chinook salmon jump in frothy white water. Credit: Laura Mahoney/USFWS
The Fivemile-Bell habitat restoration project in the Siuslaw watershed in Oregon. Credit: Siuslaw Watershed Council.
Tidal wetlands in the Nisqually River Basin, where restored habitat fosters growth of juvenile salmon and steelhead on their way to the ocean.