Protecting Ellsworth Creek Watershed
Ellsworth Creek Watershed: A project with significance beyond its boundaries
In a move that promises to transform the Ellsworth Creek project into a landscape-level effort, the Nature Conservancy and the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge received a $750,000 grant to begin a cooperative forest restoration project across a 15,000-acre region in Southwest Washington.
The grant was the second largest award in the nation under the Interior Department's new "Cooperative Conservation Initiative." The funds will enable the Conservancy and the refuge to diversify 1,500 acres of young forest with thinning treatments--considered critical to restoring forest health--and decommission 15 miles of old logging roads. The work will occur on both the 5,000-acre Ellsworth preserve and on lands owned by the refuge, including Long Island, which boasts a remarkable stand of old-growth cedar.
The Ellsworth Creek watershed includes 300 acres of precious old-growth forest, with trees thought to be more than 800 years old. The rest of the watershed -- like nearly all of the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest Coast -- is second-growth forest; that is, it has been logged at least once and then replanted or left to regenerate naturally.
Throughout the Northwest, there is great interest in restoring these second-growth forests to a more natural condition. Yet much remains to be learned about the science of forest and watershed restoration. Exactly how might we thin second-growth trees in order to accelerate the forest's development of old-growth characteristics? Can we reestablish natural processes by adding woody debris to a streambed, in order to enhance habitat for fish and other aquatic life? Precisely how would this be done most effectively?
These and many other crucial questions are being studied at Ellsworth Creek, as Conservancy scientists work with a wide range of researchers from public agencies and academia. As restoration efforts are undertaken, they will be studied carefully to learn which restoration techniques are most effective. A scientific advisory panel will help ensure the scientific validity of the research program.
The initial focus is on monitoring the current status of the watershed. Careful inventories and assessments have begun to establish the baseline required for future evaluation of restoration methods: stream habitat inventories, riparian assessments, forest road inventories, macroinvertebrate studies, plant inventories, and stream flow and rainfall monitoring. A forest inventory is expected to be completed by this fall. Still, much baseline research remains to be done, including surveys of spawning and juvenile salmon, sediment monitoring, estuary assessment, and amphibian surveys.
Once the baseline has been established, restoration work will begin, always with an eye to advancing the state of the art in forest restoration.
"Every action will be a research action," said Tom Kollasch, the Conservancy's Ellsworth Creek project manager. "As we learn more about what does and doesn't work, we can export it to other conservation and restoration practitioners in the Pacific Northwest."
The grant from the Interior Department will enhance these efforts considerably, Kollasch added. "It starts to make this into a true landscape-level restoration project."
Charlie Stenvall, manager of the Willapa refuge, said the federal grant will enable both the Conservancy and the refuge to ensure that the Willapa forests are healthy enough to support the region’s rich biological diversity, from marbled murrelets to Dunn’s salamanders. "We’re restoring our region's biological legacy," he said.
Learn more about the Nature Conservancy of Washington by visiting their website.