When you think of pristine rivers and optimal fish habitat, you might not picture log jams scattering a river system. A new way of thinking, however, is looking to the past to help create optimal habitat for wild salmon and steelhead by replicating what nature did centuries ago: adding large woody structures into rivers and streams. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon and steelhead populations are struggling, many distinct populations are on the brink, and this restoration practice offers promise to rebuild these once iconic runs. Trout Unlimited and its Western Watershed Program Director, Luke Kelly, are working to create as much beneficial habitat using large wood as they can. Follow along to learn more.
Flylords: Luke, before we dive into hydrology, old wood, and salmonids, tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.
Luke: I was born in the Midwest and grew up exploring rivers and lakes in Indiana and at my grandpa’s cabin in Ontario, Canada. My parents moved us to Colorado when I was 14 years old. I was hired as a fly tyer and fly shop employee when I was 16 and became a guide starting at 18. I went to school at the University of CO, Boulder but guided in the summers. After college, I worked as a fisheries tech for the US Forest Service, then for a fisheries consulting firm, before I started a river and lake restoration company.
In the meantime, I’d been traveling to the PNW, BC, and AK to fly fish for salmon and steelhead since the mid-1990s. In 2005, I met a girl, and long story short, I made a permanent move to WA State in 2010-11. I got a job working for a Puget Sound Indigenous Tribe in their fisheries department and was enthralled with all the marine and freshwater ecosystems encompassed. My work at the Tribe included salmon and steelhead monitoring, but it also included scientific scuba diving, shellfish monitoring, and fisheries management (crab, shrimp, clams, and oysters).
Flylords: How did you get involved with Trout Unlimited?
Luke: In 2016, after five years at the tribe, a good friend slipped a piece of paper under my nose at the Wild Steelhead Coalition board meeting (we were board members at the time). It was for a newly created position with Trout Unlimited – Olympic Peninsula Steelhead Habitat Restoration Project Manager. …I thought I was dreaming! I’d been telling myself I wanted to get back to river restoration like I did in the Rockies, but focus on my favorite region and fish…Olympic Peninsula rivers and steelhead. I was lucky that TU took a chance on me, as I’m sure I didn’t have the most experience or best credentials compared to other applicants, and I am still grateful to this day for the work I get to do with excellent colleagues and project partners.
Flylords: What does this job entail—what type of projects are you guys working on?
Luke: The program has grown fourfold since 2016, as we now have several staff diligently working to restore Olympic Peninsula (OP) watersheds. We focus most of our work on the West side of the OP – rivers and tributaries like the Quillayte, Sol Duc, Hoh, Clearwater, Queets, and Quinault. Although just a fraction of the land area compared to the rest of the state, the OP is home to over half of Washington’s non-ESA-listed salmon and steelhead populations. We’re lucky that most of these watersheds are in very good shape compared to many others in the state. The headwaters of all of these major watersheds originate in Olympic National Park, and much of our work is to either reconnect healthy habitat by removing anthropogenic fish barriers, like old and undersized culverts, or restore natural stream processes that have been disconnected or impacted by old timber harvest practices.
Much of this work includes placing large wood/trees back into steam channels that used to have natural old-growth log jams, now removed. We usually couple large wood placement with floodplain restoration by thinning mono culture stands and planting diverse tree species and undergrowth to restore diverse old growth forests with a wide range of habitats and micro-ecosystems.
Flylords: Ok, I think the best place to start is to maybe describe how the Pacific Northwest river systems and habitats have changed in, say, the last 500 years. Sure, dams and large cities are obvious, but can you point to more discrete, less mainstream impacts?
Luke: WA State is located in the center of what used to be the most prolific salmon and steelhead populations in history (tens of millions+ spawning per year), with Columbia River populations to the south and wrapping around the coast, into Puget Sound, and extending up into southern BC with the Fraser River.
So what happened? With technological advancements in fishing methods, fish canning, timber harvest mechanisms from hand saws to harvest processors, dam building, etc., human extraction of these natural resources became much more efficient, and the fish simply couldn’t keep up.
Flylords: What did PNW and OP watersheds and fish populations used to look like?
Luke: In summary, all rivers depend upon water, gradient, and sediment size/sediment loading (silt, sand, gravel, cobbles, boulders) to find a balance. Unlike many other places in the world, the temperate rainforest of the OP rivers also needs huge old-growth trees in the channel to create the stable log jams and habitats the salmon and steelhead have evolved to depend upon.
So, the OP used to have huge trees that fell into the streams and rivers and created logjams. These logjams were much more stable than we see today. These jams essentially create and maintain pools and also places for finer sediments, like gravel, to settle out and not be washed downstream. The jams act as refuges for pools, cool water, and stable locations where gravel can persist and provide spawning habitats for adult salmon and steelhead. Additionally, these jams have significant hydrologic forces that initiate surface water and groundwater exchange.
When flowing river water is forced into the streambed and flows under the streambed/underground, we call this hyporheic flow. This hyporheic flow is critical for supplying cool water in summer and providing increased base flow in summer seasons (similar to the benefits of beaver ponds and beaver dams). Studies of hyporheic flow have shown that some of this flow can resurface hundreds of meters, if not miles/kilometers, downstream with stream temps significantly lower than ambient stream temps …all due to the presence of natural lag jams.
Again, what did it used to look like? Floodplain and riparian forests were diverse and had many species of plants and animals of multiple ages and niches. Mainstem and tributary streams had many old natural log jams to split flows, create side channels, provide an array of habitats for rearing and spawning salmon and steelhead, and promote influxes of flow and cold water refugia for all aquatic species. The latest available science indicates, on OP watersheds, we have less than one-quarter the number of natural log jams we used to have before colonization, and in many cases on specific stream reaches, more like 1/10th.
Currently, we see riparian and instream habitats that are single-thread streams. These single-thread streams and rivers do not have off-channel habitats for rearing and spawning. There is a significant lack of surface water/groundwater exchange, and the stream temperatures and base flows are suffering. Although we are removing dams, timber harvest rules/’forest practices’ have been greatly improved, commercial fishing management has greatly improved, and we are investing millions in OP habitat restoration, the needle is slow to move toward evidence of recovery.
Large wood/trees on the OP have been proven by science time and again to be a missing element not present today. In pristine habitats in the Queets/Clearwater, scientists have dated new exposed relic trees in the stream channel to be up to 9.000 years old!
Flylords: What’s next for these PNW rivers and your work?
Luke: We are working hard with our partners, including federal, state, and tribal governments, to move the needle toward true recovery and long-term resilience. In the PNW and on the OP, we all need to understand that healthy riverine habitats rely on water, gradient, and sediment, but large wood is also critical to the equation. Without the huge, old-growth wood, we are building recovery with just the nuts and not the bolts.
Today, TU, Tribes, and our partners are working to bring the best available science forward to restore habitats. We are implementing projects to install engineered logjams, because the large trees are not long available to serve their natural purpose. At the same time, we are working to replant diverse riparian/floodplain forests and steward those efforts so there are huge trees to take over the natural habitat-forming processes 100+ years from now. The OP will be a case study and success story for other watersheds in the PNW.
Flylords: What about fish? How would have salmonids utilized and benefited from historic logjams?
Luke: Logjams are a critical shelter for salmonids in coastal rivers. When you snorkel these streams, in high or low flows throughout the year, you’ll travel long lengths and sporadically find fish. But when you get to a logjam, you’ll find both juvenile and adult fish packed into these places. Logjams add roughness to streams. They stabilize the banks and river channel, scour deep pools and they sort sediment and gravel flowing downstream during rain events, which is why you’ll often find high-quality spawning habitat in the slow water downstream right of big jams. The deep pools connect the streams to groundwater, which helps stabilize water temperatures throughout the year and recharge groundwater supplies after big rain events. Also, by slowing and diverting streamflow during those big rain events, which are common on the coast, logjams send water out onto a river’s floodplain. Aside from benefits for riparian vegetation, this is critical habitat for juvenile salmon and steelhead who would otherwise be swept downstream by heavy flows. The little fish can move out into the slow, flooded riparian zone and come back to the stream as the water recedes. In streams where logjams are missing, and the current barrels through narrow, incised river channels like a firehose during high water, this is a big source of mortality for fish populations.
Flylords: Unfortunately, humans have dramatically altered the natural services of logjams…but you and other restoration specialists are actively working on getting wood back into rivers. Tell us about these projects? What’s the process look like?
Luke: These projects require a great deal of planning, engineering, and fundraising. Start to finish can easily be five to six years of work from the first site surveys to work on the ground. On the OP, you need to go big or go home. Because of our intense winter flows, you need huge logs and ballast. We’re working with large trees, often with big, intact root wads. We’ve lost most of our old-growth forest on the Olympic Peninsula, so finding the large trees required – and the trees that would have been common historically – is a challenge.
Moving these trees requires heavy equipment. We’ll use helicopters in many situations to carry and stack the big logs into place if we can’t reach them with trucks. For much of this work, we’ve been working closely with Natural Systems Design. For decades, they’ve been leaders in the science of log jams and the practical techniques to build them, such as the types of wood to use, how to place them in the channel, etc. Our projects have benefited a great deal from their experience, methodologies, and ongoing research.
We’re trying to think about the long-term. The scale of centuries. In the short term, we need to get the wood back into the streams and make sure the logjams are built to stay in place for decades. That helps kickstart recovery and immediately provides fish with crucial habitat. But we’re always looking at the reconnected floodplains and riparian habitat along the streams. We need to plant and steward this habitat after the initial project, because we need to re-grow the diverse, complex forests and large trees that used to exist along these rivers. We’re working to restart the process of how coastal watersheds sustain themselves. Eventually, by the time our log jams are finally wearing away, there will be new, large trees falling into these streams and naturally gathering into logjams, just like they had when the habitat was intact.
Forest policy is a big piece of the puzzle, too. Historically, many of these streams were logged all the way down to the streambank. Laws and logging practices have been improved since then, which protects the riparian zone and gives these important places a chance to regrow and restore their ecological functionality along the stream.
Flylords: What are you seeing? How are the river ecosystems responding?
Luke: Like I was saying earlier, logjams are a magnet for fish. When we revisit the sites, we find juvenile and adult fish under that cover and spawning above and below them in gravel that didn’t exist before the jams were built.
In the Quinault River, pebble counts done to measure sediment sorting following
projects have shown that spawning gravel has increased by 500% in some places. We see the river channel stabilizing around the jams and new riparian trees growing in
reconnected floodplains. I also think it is fair to say that restoring log jams at this scale is still a relatively young practice. We’re seeing really encouraging results for local water temperatures and habitat improvements, but there is always a need to keep learning and improving practices. The work of researchers like Natural Systems Design and many others in the field is crucial to understanding how to best restart hydrological and ecological processes, build the structures themselves, and assess the floodplain habitat improvements and ongoing benefits for fish. When we look at the streams on the coast, we know they are missing the logjams that existed historically. We’re working hard to get this wood back into place.
Flylords: How can people learn more and get involved?
Luke: Anglers and conservationists have a bunch of opportunities to learn more about this work. I’m a Trout Unlimited guy, so I’m going to point you towards TU for sure. We talk about our work on the Olympic Peninsula – both instream restoration and fish passage projects – in our recent video Restoring Rainforest Rivers. You can find it on YouTube and on our website. This winter, we’re also going to have a new video specifically about the logjams we’re installing with the Hoh Tribe and other partners on Owl Creek, an important spawning and rearing tributary on the Hoh River. So keep an eye out for that, too.
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Likewise, my colleagues who work on our North Coast Coho Project are doing exceptional work in the streams and rivers on California’s Lost Coast. They have some great resources about their work to restore large wood in salmon and steelhead streams, often in close partnership with logging companies. You can learn more about their work on our website, in some great articles from the NOAA Restoration Center, and keep up to date with all our work on TU’s social media channels. Some of the rivers in Northern California, especially those in Mendocino, have seen really encouraging coho salmon returns in recent years, too. Habitat restoration is a piece of the puzzle, helping to recover these struggling populations.
Finally, I would encourage anglers to find their local Trout Unlimited chapter and get involved. There are great ways to support this restoration work and volunteer at post-project tree planting and ongoing stewardship efforts.
Photos courtesy of Trout Unlimited
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