Intensively Monitored Watersheds

• Entiat
• Bridge Creek
• Lemhi

Most habitat restoration projects are conducted at too small a scale to cause a detectable fish response at the population level and lack a proper experimental design to determine cause and effect mechanisms. The solution is an Intensively Monitored Watershed (IMW), a coordinated restoration effort with associated effectiveness monitoring at a watershed-scale.

Under an IMW implementation, restoration actions and monitoring are tightly coordinated to maximize the ability to detect fish responses to changes in their habitat and are used to identify mechanisms by which habitat manipulations impact fish so that the strategies can be extrapolated to other systems. The ISEMP has 4 IMWs underway: the Bridge Creek IMW in the John Day subbasin, OR, the Lemhi IMW and Salmon River in the Salmon River subbasin, ID, and the Entiat River IMW in Washington.

Landscape classifications of the Intensively Monitored Watersheds 6th Field HUCs. Legend shows the different classes represented by landscape classification (see Projects Pages).