The Van Duzen River

TU’s North Coast Coho Project completed three projects that restore floodplain habitat connectivity in Lawrence Creek, a tributary to Yager Creek in the Van Duzen River drainage in Humboldt County, California.

The Van Duzen River is a major tributary to the Eel River, which is California’s third largest watershed and a legendary wild steelhead and salmon fishery. Due to the value of this rich fishery, much of the Eel River and its tributaries are the focus of intensive restoration efforts. Despite historical landscape alterations (mainly from legacy timber harvest practices and road building), the Van Duzen River and Yager Creek sub-basin retain some of the best potential for high quality salmonid habitat in the Eel River drainage.

The Lawrence Creek Reconnection of Critical Off-Channel Salmon Habitat project follows the success of another effort to quickly benefit ESA-listed Coho and Chinook salmon and native steelhead in Lawrence Creek. This project restored some five acres and 1,000 feet of off-channel habitat, and connectivity with the mainstem creek, providing valuable habitat to salmon and steelhead.

The grant comes from the Community-based Habitat Restoration Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. This program supports active engagement of communities in on-the-ground restoration of local habitats. The project is one of only ten funded in this grant cycle out of hundreds of applicants.

According to Anna Halligan, director of the North Coast Coho Project, the “real story” of this project and recent grant award is the partnership it supports between TU, private timber companies, consulting firms and resource agency field staff who are working collaboratively to implement high priority actions under the federal recovery plans for Coho and steelhead in this region.

Recovery of Coho Salmon in Yager Creek is dependent on rapid action to protect or improve conditions in Lawrence Creek (CDFW, 2017). The objectives of the proposed project are to assess, design, permit, and enhance two off-channel floodplain habitat restoration projects in the Lawrence Creek sub-basin by 2020. To achieve this, TU led grant administration and project coordination, Humboldt Redwood Company and Pacific Watershed Associates worked together to complete the design, implementation, and monitoring, while NOAA Fisheries staff provided technical feedback on designs and assisted with project monitoring. Among other benefits, this collaboration drove costs down substantially.

Following the success of the Lawrence Creek Reconnection of Critical Off-Channel Salmon Habitat, NOAA awarded the same team to manage, design, and implement the Lawrence Creek Hydrologic Reconnection of Critical Off-Channel Salmonid Habitat. The next iteration of the project was implemented downstream and used many of the lessons learned from previous projects in Lawrence Creek. Pacific Watershed Associates put together two videos of the process, shown below.

The Humboldt Redwood Company (HRC) is one of TU’s most important and long-standing partners in habitat restoration, road repair and decommissioning, and fish barrier mitigation projects along the North Coast.