Tribes, State, and Public Work Together to Protect our Ocean
This December marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. Since 1986, the organization has made great strides in protecting the coastal redwood ecosystem and local tribes' traditional ways of life, and in providing education about tribally directed land conservation efforts. The Sinkyone Council is a community-based conservation initiative, formed and operated by appointed representatives of the tribal nations whose peoples have lived on, understood, and cared for North Coast lands since time immemorial. (read more)


30th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference April 4-7, 2012 in Davis, CA
In 2012 the Salmonid Restoration Federation will produce the 30th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference in Davis, California. This year's conference is entitled 30 Years of Fisheries and Watershed Restoration--Embarking on a New Generation. The first two days of the conference will be filled with full-day workshops and field tours. A half-day plenary session will be followed by 1.5 days of technical, biological, and policy-related concurrent sessions. This conference will focus on a broad range of salmonid and watershed restoration topics of concern to restoration practitioners, watershed scientists, fisheries biologists, resource agency personnel, land-use planners, and landowners. (read more)


The Fish Cast Their Vote
How can we best and most quickly promote the recovery of salmon habitat in the Mattole River headwaters? The answer to this question has been passionately pursued over the last year by Sanctuary Forest, in collaboration with fishery scientists, restoration experts, and a variety of invested state, federal, and private agencies. Together we have walked streams in the upper Mattole, hoping to learn how to best blend scientific fishery practices in the Northwest with observations of naturally thriving local fish habitat. (read more)


Are California's Salmon Facing Extinction?: Measuring the Benefits of Coho Habitat Restoration: A Field Report from the Middle Section of the Klamath River
Since 2006, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC) and the Karuk Tribe Fisheries Program (KTFP) have been collaborating on implementing coho habitat enhancement and restoration projects that address key limiting factors of coho life histories in the Klamath River system. With a handful of folks implementing these projects on limited time and resources, reporting the benefits of this work often gets less attention than it should. Especially considering the results are what make the long road of assessing, permitting, implementing and monitoring restoration projects ultimately worthwhile. (read more)


Are California's Salmon Facing Extinction?: Last Call for Coho: An Iconic Species on the Brink in the Mattole Valley and Beyond
Scores of young fish gleam like sparkling confetti as they swirl around in a submerged metal box. Volunteers and employees of the nonprofit Mattole Salmon Group are tallying fish as they migrate from the Mattole River's headwaters toward the ocean. The workers briefly trap a percentage of the young fish, count and measure them, then release them back to the river. (read more)


Restoring the Lagunitas Creek Watershed
The Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) is a community and volunteer-driven organization whose mission is to protect and conserve endangered Central California Coast coho salmon and the threatened steelhead trout that spawn in the Lagunitas Creek Watershed in West Marin County. Nestled amongst redwoods and big leaf maples, the Lagunitas and San Geronimo Creeks contain the largest remaining wild population of Central California Coast coho salmon. The coho are listed on both the state and federal levels as endangered; their numbers have dwindled to a tiny vestige of their historic levels. This decline in population is driven primarily by alterations to crucial habitat and degradation of water quality. Salmon need cold, clean water to spawn successfully and to be capable of surviving the migration to the ocean. Development, particularly in the riparian zone along the creek banks, has led to increased sediment loads flowing into the stream systems. (read more)


Time to Demand Change: Navy Preparing to Expand War Games off North Coast
For years, the U.S. Navy has been planning to boost the intensity and variety of its war game exercises within the Northwest Training Range Complex (NWTRC). Now, with a green light from key environmental agencies, it appears this wish soon will be realized. (read more)


Tree Planting Now and Into the Future
Since we began our fisheries restoration work in the mid 1980s, tree planting has played a significant role in our efforts to restore riparian function and support the health of salmon and steelhead populations in the South Fork Eel River Basin. Some of these trees are now more than thirty feet tall and well on their way to becoming forests. Working Assets, the phone service provider, again supplied funding for 2010/2011 tree planting efforts on our recently completed Miller Creek Slide Stabilization Project and Leggett Creek Fish Passage Project. This year we planted over 600 trees, which included redwood, Douglas-fir, incense cedar, white alder and willow. In addition to recently completed restoration projects, we are pleased that the sediment basins, which were previously constructed below the Blue Goo Slide near Briceland, have again trapped and kept hundreds of cubic yards of sediment from entering Redwood Creek. The trees planted on this landslide are now becoming a dense forest, so much so that it is now difficult to take photographs that show the slide and its problems from previously established photo points. We are happy with this newly developing forest's growth, sediment trapping ability, organic litter recruitment promoting soil development and the shade provided on hot summer days from the ever expanding canopy. Raw hill-sides are now looking much better because of the forests that are developing from the thousands of trees that the Eel River Salmon Restoration Project has planted since the 1980s. (read more)


EPIC & Friends Seek Protection for Klamath Spring Chinook
In late January of 2011, EPIC and allies filed a petition with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to protect Klamath River Chinook salmon under the federal Endangered Species Act. The petition focuses on the urgent need to protect wild spring-run Chinook. Spring-run Chinook were once the most abundant run of Klamath Chinook, but are now perilously close to extinction in even their last remaining stronghold in the Salmon River basin. Where hundreds of thousands of fish used to run, in recent years the Salmon's remnant population of spring-run Chinook has struggled to exceed a thousand fish. In 2005, fewer than a hundred spawners returned to the Salmon basin. (read more)


Miller Grove Restoration
Mill Valley StreamKeepers benefits from our new partnership with the Trees Foundation. We received several online donations which is expanding our support base and has increased our sponsorship. We also received a $2,000 Cereus grant for producing an updated brochure for our watershed. Mill Valley StreamKeepers is extremely grateful to the Cereus donor for this wonderful contribution to our outreach program. (read more)


Just Another Day Fighting for the Coho in the Lagunitas Creek Watershed
It's a sunny Saturday at the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) offices beside Lagunitas Creek in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Chattering birds descend from branches overhead. The green is so vibrant, the breeze fragrant, the blue sky and white puffs of cloud exaggerated in color and closeness. And in the midst of this, the now chocolate-colored Lagunitas Creek has swallowed a good portion of its floodplain and is rushing west toward Tomales Bay. (read more)


Editors Note
Well into the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into coal mines as an early-warning signal for toxic gases. The birds, being more sensitive, would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape into fresh air. More recently, indicator species (like the canary) are being used as measures of habitat or ecosystem quality. (read more)


State of the Salmonids: Mattole Coho Salmon Population Critically Low, Chinook on the Decline: Urgent Action Needed
The Mattole River Watershed encompasses 300 square miles of northern Mendocino and southern Humboldt counties in northwestern California. Much of the drainage is remote, located within the King Range National Conservation Area and other state and federal holdings, and is of biological significance, draining directly into a State-designated Area of Special Biological Significance, Critical Coastal Area, and Marine Protected Area. The Mattole is unique to many of the salmon-bearing streams in the Pacific Northwest due to its lack of dams and any significant introduction of hatchery-raised fish. (read more)


State of the Salmonids: Restoring Coho Salmon in the Klamath River, One Beaver At A Time
After a sleepless full moon night with our 18-month-old daughter, I bundled her onto my back and walked down to the Klamath River in the pre-dawn light, fishing pole in one hand, balancing out the diaper bag in the other. I had a spot in mind, just downstream of the Orleans Bar River Access, where the river slides over a broad riffle so shallow that the fish are forced into a narrow slot that one could cast across, even with a groggy, grumpy, sleep-deprived toddler strapped to one's back. (read more)


Welcome to Our New Partner: Mill Valley StreamKeepers
Mill Valley StreamKeepers (MVSK) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that grew out of the Mill Valley Watershed Project, which began in 1994. Our purpose is to protect and restore the watershed of the city of Mill Valley, Richardson Bay, and adjacent unincorporated areas. Because Richardson Bay is part of the San Francisco Bay, we are involved with organizations working to promote the health and functioning of the North Bay and, in fact, the whole coastal/Bay region. (read more)