The CTUIR Walla Walla River Basin Fish Habitat Enhancement Project, initiated in 1996, is an ongoing effort to protect, enhance, and restore riparian and instream habitat critical to the survival of native salmonid fish.  Project activities focus on the restoration and protection of critical riparian, floodplain, and stream characteristics needed to support the life-cycle of native fish.  

In this funding cycle, the project will be implementing a large instream habitat enhancement project on .75 miles of the mainstem Walla Walla River east of Milton Freewater, Oregon.  This project will excavate approximately 500’ of new side channel habitat designed to enhance juvenile habitat, improve stream complexity through the placement of 125 whole conifer trees, remove more than 1000’ of rock levee, reactivate much of the currently inaccessible floodplain, and develop more than a dozen primary pools.  

The project will also be completing designs for almost a mile of instream work on the South Fork of the Walla Walla, a perched culvert on Couse Creek, and a passage barrier at the mouth of Couse Creek.  Each of these projects is planned for construction in 2011.

The project will continue operations and maintenance on 10 streams miles of existing project areas.  A suite of long-term project effectiveness monitoring parameters will be measured and analyzed during the funding cycle on a portion of the project areas and the project leader and staff will participate as needed with various resource groups.

CCR-21264

Capital Equipment:

Trimble Robotic Total Station and Tripod.  We are currently sharing survey equipment with four other basins, creating scheduling conflicts and significant lost time due to travel and equipment issues. The Trimble S3 Total Station was selected to maintain maximum interoperability with the current shared CTUIR Trimble R8 GNSS survey equipment; the internal radio and robotic operation will allow one-person operation when necessary. The selected package includes the robotic total station with 2” angular accuracy, TSC2 survey controller, Trimble Access and TBC survey software packages, telescopic rod, tripod, and other needed accessories. This additional piece of equipment will be used for pre- and post-project monitoring and for design surveying. Examples will include permanent stream cross sections, stream longitudinal profiles, topographical surveys, and a full range of habitat and other surveys to be interfaced with GIS mapping.

Maintain Vegetation-controlled grazing on South Fork Touchet River-Rainwater

One of the most effective tools in the ongoing battle against invasive weeds is often right on the farm: Livestock. Goats in particular are increasingly being used across the West to reduce invasive weed populations through prescriptive grazing. With prescriptive grazing, livestock graze at the time and frequency when weeds are the most vulnerable. Their grazing behavior is modified so the animals concentrate their grazing on the targeted weed. Most weeds, at their proper growth stage, are quite nutritious for livestock, said Glenn Shewmaker, a University of Idaho Extension forage specialist. But Yellow starthistle is an acquired taste, even for goats, But once they get used to it, they'll eat it readily clear through the flowering stage. Some goats eventually prefer it over grass.