- About the Watershed
- Fish and Wildlife
ABOUT THE WATERSHED
Fish and Wildlife
The overarching goal stated in the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project March 2000 Scope of Work for fish habitat is:
To protect or enhance fish habitat in the management area and to restore salmon, steelhead, and trout populations to healthy and harvestable levels and improve habitats on which fish rely.
To meet this goal, the technical assessment requirements specified in the March 2000 Scope of Work are to coordinate with WRIA 1 salmon recovery efforts in three general areas:
- Populations - Develop information that summarizes current and historic fish habitat and populations;
- Fish Habitat Needs - Evaluate physical, biological, and chemical processes in terms of good fish habitat; and
- Limiting Factor - Evaluate factors limiting current finfish and shellfish populations throughout WRIA 1.
This purpose of the fish habitat section of the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Plan-Phase I is to describe the approach used to coordinate fish habitat work already underway in the basin with the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project, and to summarize information on populations, fish habitat needs, and limiting factors. It is important to note that there are a number of actions underway to address fish habitat issues that are being done outside the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project. The WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project supports and enhances many of the outside efforts through both technical assessment work and activities associated with some of the management recommendations regarding The Instream Flow Action Plan, Pilot Programs and WRIA-Wide Programs. In addition, a long-term strategy for how to enhance coordination between the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project and Salmon Recovery is provided in Section 4 Governance and Implementation Strategy of the Watershed Management Plan.
The approach used to enhance coordination of efforts between the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project and other salmon recovery programs was to create a WRIA 1 Fish Habitat Technical Team. This Technical Team was considered a pivotal group for purposes of linking the various efforts. The Fish Habitat Technical Team (TT), as with other technical teams, was open to membership from the Planning Unit caucuses and the initiating governments. The Fish Habitat TT largely functioned in a joint capacity with the Instream Flow TT given the integrated nature of the topics and technical work.
The primary functions of the Fish Habitat TT were to assist project consultants get access to existing fish habitat data and reports; provide local technical expertise on fish habitat condition and functions, populations, periodicity (timing of the various salmonid lifestages in the freshwater system), and spatial distributions; and, to coordinate the flow of information between the watershed planning process and salmon recovery efforts in WRIA 1. These latter functions included assessments and actions by the salmon co-managers and others, projects developed through the Lead Entity under Engrossed Senate House Bill 2496, access to restoration project data compiled by the members of the Nooksack Recovery Team and information such as limiting factors analysis being used to develop the WRIA 1 Salmonid Recovery Plan.
The Fish Habitat TT assisted USU investigators with access to and compilation of the existing fish habitat data for WRIA 1. Fish (salmonid) distribution maps generated for the Washington Conservation Commission’s limiting factors report project were updated with current information by local experts and made available to USU. Anchor Environmental, under contract with the City of Bellingham, prepared a report describing salmonid periodicity. The TT also prepared a report describing important temperature and dissolved oxygen thresholds for fish life to be used in evaluating both water quality and instream flow-modeling results. Finally, new fish habitat data were collected at each of the intensive and rapid assessment instream flow analyzed under this project. These sites were selected to be representative of the range of both stream and fish habitat types within WRIA 1 and form the basis for extrapolation of instream flow habitat results from a measured and modeled site to one that has similar habitat, geomorphology, hydrology, and fish use, yet is unmeasured. This is more fully explained under the instream flow section.