Native Mattole salmon and the Mattole Salmon Group (MSG) have had a challenging and exciting year, notable for its new initiatives and innovative projects, and the usual wild cards dealt by Mother Nature. Abundant rains in March and April ensured plentiful water for salmonid fry lucky enough to survive the difficult 2002-2003 spawning season. High river levels kept the river mouth open well into summer and allowed nearly all of this year's down-migrating young Chinook salmon to enter the ocean rather than be trapped in the overheated lagoon that forms when the river mouth closes. For the first time in four years, over - summering coho salmon and steelhead fry had adequate river flow in the Mattole headwaters.

The Mattole Salmon Group has entered into a new partnership with the Mattole Restoration Council, Sanctuary Forest, the Middle Mattole Conservancy and other local restoration groups, as well as state and federal agencies. This partnership, known as River and Range, will help the partners plan, coordinate, and implement comprehensive restoration throughout the Mattole watershed, and serve as a model for similar partnerships in other watersheds.

MSG's first River and Range contract has us doing detailed channel monitoring in the Mattole headwaters. This involves measuring various characteristics of the stream channel in several tributaries, in order to establish baseline information for judging the effectiveness of current and future restoration projects.

Our most ambitious project this year, financed by the California Department of Fish and Game, is a pilot project geared to improving salmonid habitat in the Mattole estuary. Using large boulders, logs donated by local landowners, and redwood root wads donated by Caltrans, we have built a large structure in the channel whose purpose is to cause the river to scour a large deep pool that will serve as a cool water refuge for Chinook salmon fry during the summer. If the structure functions as intended, it will be the first of several built to form a network of pools that will enable the estuary to nurture thousands of young salmon through the summer, as it did before sediment from human activity turned it into a shallow, overheated summertime death-trap for salmon.

For more information go to msg@mattolesalmon.org


More Updates

• March, 2003 Update
  
• November, 2002 Update
  
• August, 2002 Update
  
• May, 2001 Update
  
• January, 2001 Update
  

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