By Greg Fitz, Trout Unlimited
California’s beautiful North Coast is a rugged landscape of sharp mountains, towering forests, and complex networks of rivers and streams draining into the Pacific Ocean. Once home to staggering numbers of resident and migratory trout and salmon, generations of habitat degradation have pushed many native fish populations to the brink.
For nearly 25 years, Trout Unlimited’s North Coast Coho Project (NCCP) has been working to restore and reconnect habitat, recover salmon and steelhead populations, and build the partnerships that make watershed scale restoration possible. Born in the late 1990s, the NCCP began as a unique partnership between Trout Unlimited and the Mendocino Redwood Company. On the heels of new regulations limiting the amount of sediment allowed to flush into streams (sediment fills pools and stifles gravel for spawning) and Endangered Species Act protections for Lost Coast coho and steelhead, the two organizations began working together to dramatically reduce the amount of material entering salmon and steelhead streams flowing through the logging company’s land.
Since then, the NCCP has grown into a program of astounding scope. In addition to the ongoing collaboration with the Mendocino Redwood Company, today the NCCP encompasses partnerships with multiple timber companies; other private and public landowners, including California State Parks; federal, state, and local agencies; other conservation organizations; and a network of dedicated local contractors and consultants. The project sites are located throughout NorCal, between San Francisco and the Oregon border, and include the Eel, Ten Mile, Noyo, Big, Albion, Navarro, Garcia, and Russian River watersheds, Lagunitas Creek watershed, and smaller drainages like Freshwater, Usal, Cottaneva, and Pudding Creeks.
To make habitat restoration work possible, the NCCP has raised or leveraged more than $37 million, with much of the funds directly benefitting local employment and infrastructure improvements. The projects add wood back to streams to restore habitat complexity and hold water on the landscape, reconnect off-channel and alcove habitat, remove failing culverts and barriers to fish passage, and improve or decommission logging roads to reduce sediment flow. One ambitious upcoming project will restore a private golf course, making the land public and reconnecting vital habitat and migratory corridors for fish and other wildlife. The NCCP accomplishes this wide scope of work using a combination of low-tech restoration methods and elaborate projects requiring extensive engineering, permitting, and heavy equipment.
During the past 24 years, NCCP projects have added nearly 7,000 pieces of large wood to more than 132 miles of coho and steelhead streams; improved or decommissioned nearly 900 miles of forest roads; prevented over 700,000 cubic yards of sediment (the equivalent of approximately 71,000 dump truck loads) from reaching streams; and removed 15 major fish-passage barriers, restoring salmon and steelhead access to more than 73 miles of habitat.
Far from slowing down, the NCCP and its partners continue to expand the impact of its work. With more projects on the schedule, additional staff and partners joining the effort, and new federal investments supporting the work, the coming years will be busier than ever. “We consistently find juvenile and adult salmon utilizing the habitat that we helped restore, which is gratifying in ways that words can’t express,” explains Anna Halligan, NCCP’s director. “It also motivates us to get even more work done. When you take a step back and look at the habitat degradation that has occurred over time, paired with the expediency of climate change, it’s hard not to feel a sense of urgency to act.”
Learn more about the NCCP and support its work at www.northcoastcohoproject.org.
