Ecological Process Restoration

Since its inception in 1989, Wild Fish Conservancy has placed a high priority on implementing restoration projects to improve conditions for the region’s native fish.  We focus our projects on restoring natural watershed processes that have been compromised by past land-use practices. Properly functioning wild-fish habitats are complex, dynamic, and self-maintaining. We develop projects intended to recreate these same type of natural conditions, ranging in scale from local fish passage restoration at barrier culverts to reach-level restoration of floodplain habitats.

The Wild Fish Conservancy identifies potential projects through systematic inventory, assessment, and prioritization of factors limiting the health and productivity of watersheds.  Other projects are stimulated by the results of water-typing surveys, which quantify and map fish habitat conditions.  Some of our projects are accessible to the public for outreach and education purposes, and most are monitored for several years before and after implementation.

We are continually engaged in restoration projects in a variety of freshwater, estuarine, and nearshore-marine environments.  The Weiss Creek Restoration Project is an ongoing effort to recreate natural stream function and improve fish rearing and spawning habitat in lower Weiss Creek in eastern King County, Washington. The  Dosewallips Estuary Restoration Project was begun in 2004 and will continue through the summer of 2008 and beyond. The large scale project is intended to increase and enhance capacity for juvenile and adult salmonids by restoring tidal function, encouraging channel and pool formation, and controlling invasive nonnative plants on the salt marsh at the mouth of the Dosewallips River on Hood Canal in western Washington.

Read reports, technical documents, and other information regarding other past, ongoing, and pending Wild Fish Conservancy ecological process restoration projects.