Working with Beaver to Restore Salmon Habitat in the Bridge Creek Intensively Monitored Watershed: Design Rationale and Hypotheses.

摘要

The incised and degraded habitat of Bridge Creek is thought to be limiting a population of steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. A logical restoration approach is to improve their habitat through reconnecting the channel with portions of its former floodplain (now terraces) to increase both stream and riparian habitat complexity. Using conventional restoration techniques to achieve such objectives can be quite costly, because it involves moving and grading large volumes of fill with heavy equipment that exposes bare ground and is usually followed by extensive revegetation efforts. Here we seek a cost-effective, process-based approach to restore geomorphic, hydrologic, and ecological functions of this degraded system, helping a small, extant beaver (Castor canadensis) population build longer-lived dams.