A failed road site, showing collapsed road and sediment
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Project Title
Sediment Budget Modeling to Prioritize Habitat Recovery Actions in Puget Sound
Description
Human impacts on landslide rates and sediment supply have decreased quantity and quality of salmon habitats throughout their range in the Pacific Northwest. Restoring sediment supplies and habitats to more natural levels could require millions of dollars expended on forest road removal or reconstruction if all roads were to be treated. The primary objective of this project is to estimate increases in landslide-derived sediment as a function of land use. The most common tool for estimating changes in sediment supply due to land use is the sediment budget. However, creating sediment budgets is labor intensive and expensive, so relatively few sediment budgets are available in the Pacific Northwest. Therefore, identifying a robust procedure for extrapolating a small amount of data to a large and variable terrain will be invaluable in the recovery planning process.
Identification of areas where road restoration is most needed can substantially reduce restoration costs by targeting funds at the most hazardous sites. This project uses a process-based approach to predict which areas in the Puget Sound will experience sediment inputs that are harmful to anadromous salmonids. This identifies areas where human influences have raised sediment supplies to harmful levels, as well as areas that naturally experience harmful inputs. This project serves two purposes in recovery planning for Pacific Northwest salmon:
- Identifying areas where sediment supplies have most likely been raised to harmful levels.
- Providing a means of assessing failure risk of various in-stream restoration projects that can be overwhelmed by anthropogenic changes in sediment supply.
Investigators
Tim Beechie and Blake Feist
Collaborators
Dave Montgomery and Noah Finnegan (University of Washington); Eric Beamer (Skagit System Cooperative); and Richard Hicks (Conservation Biology Division)
Support
NOAA Fisheries, and Skagit System Cooperative
Project Status
Data analyses ongoing
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