Restoring the Pacific Northwest: The Art and Science of Ecological Restoration in Cascadia

By Dean Apostol and Eric  Higgs

The Pacific Northwest is a global ecological "hotspot" because of its relatively healthy native ecosystems, a high degree of biodiversity, and the number and scope of restoration initiatives that have been undertaken there. Restoring the Pacific Northwest gathers and presents the best examples of state-of-the-art restoration techniques and projects. It is an encyclopedic overview that will be an invaluable reference not just for restorationists and students working in the Pacific Northwest, but for practitioners across North America and around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610911030

Eric  Higgs

Eric Higgs directs the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria.

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others.

INTRODUCTION

DEAN APOSTOL

Restoring the Pacific Northwest represents a remarkable collaboration between writers, practitioners, foundations, agencies, businesses, and individual supporters, all with a common interest in using the art and science of ecological restoration in the service of conservation. This book came to life as an idea linked to a regional conference being planned by the Society for Ecological Restoration Northwest Chapter (SERNW). The initial idea was to gather leading practitioners to document the state of the art of ecological restoration in the region and thus help advance its practice. This reflects the stage of development of restoration, which is still quite a young field and is advancing primarily through the efforts of field practitioners rather than academic researchers. Practitioners are very busy saving the planet and do not have much time for research and writing, so much of the best technical knowledge is locked up in the heads and field notes of biologists, ecologists, botanists, landscape architects, and laborers who toil away on restoration projects. When practitioners get together at conferences and symposia, they share this information and learn from each other, but their knowledge is rarely disseminated more widely. Much good restoration information also exists in gray literature (non-peer reviewed) technical reports and memos, also not very accessible to a wider audience.

Conference presenters were asked to participate in development of a book that would provide an encyclopedia of regional restoration practice. A similar effort had been made at the second Society for Ecological Restoration conference in Chicago in 1990. There, a multiday session on tallgrass prairie restoration picked the brains of leading practitioners, who shared the tricks they had learned over decades of practice. The event was recorded, with a writer in residence. Several years later Island Press produced the The Tallgrass Restoration Handbook (edited by Stephen Packard and Cornelia Mutel, 1997, with a new edition in 2005), now well on its way to becoming a classic of restoration literature.

It soon became apparent that the encyclopedia project could not be organized and funded in time to take advantage of the conference as initially envisioned. Nevertheless, funding gradually was secured, contributors were recruited, a prospectus was drafted, and a book began to take shape. As the project progressed, SERNW decided to hand off fiscal oversight to the Rivers Foundation of the Americas, which assisted seeing the effort through. The result represents what we hope will be a milestone: a first gathering of many of the leading lights of ecological restoration in the Pacific Northwest, with their best ideas and experiences captured in the book you now hold in your hands.

Book Organization

The focus of this book is ecological restoration in the Pacific Northwest, an imprecise geographic term for a region that has been described and defined in many different ways. Some use it to refer only to the rainy parts of our region lying west of the Cascades, British Columbia Coast Range mountains, and southeast Alaska-the land of mysterious giant, dripping conifers where the bulk of regional population resides. The U.S. Forest Service defines the Pacific Northwest administratively as limited to Oregon and Washington. Other agencies and geographers use the term to include Idaho, western Montana, and sometimes northern California, British Columbia, and Alaska. As Eric Higgs points out in the foreword, Pacific Northwest is a particularly problematic term for Canadians, whose idea of north is a bit different from that of Americans. An obvious choice for this book, given its origins, was to simply encompass the boundaries of the SERNW. This range included both sides of the mountains, the entire Columbia Basin, and some of northern California and southeast Alaska. But the complication was the hole in the region formed by the creation of a separate British Columbia chapter, which divides Alaska from the Northwestern states. So following in the American imperial tradition, we decided to annex much of British Columbia, although we did ask their permission. Color Plate 1 expresses the final geography chosen for this book quite beautifully and accurately. It defines the Pacific Northwest as all the watersheds that flow to the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rainforest zone. This definition extends the range east to the continental divide in Montana. Cascadia is included in the subtitle because it provides a more nation-neutral bioregional description of roughly the same territory. Granted, the Cascade Mountains are only a part of the whole, yet the volcanoes that crown them represent the dynamism of nature here, the beauty of this land, and provide a clear compass point and enduring image of the region for residents, visitors, and those far away who know of us only through photographs and travel writing.

The Pacific Northwest encompasses overlapping and competing ecosystems and cultures. There has always been, at least since European settlement, a tension and perhaps jealousy between those living east of the mountains, in the dry rain shadow with its more continental climate, and those living to the west, in the moist maritime zone. Those of us in the wet west look with envy to the dry east in the middle of our dreary winters, but in times of searing drought, or perhaps during the search for a decent double mocha latte, the reverse happens. Recently, the mountain divide has also become something of a political divide, as red and blue America fight it out every 4 years, even while the more peaceful Canadians legalize same-sex marriage and pot smoking. Tension and envy, we are happy to report, are not apparent among ecological restorationists living in different parts of this region. We are too poor, powerless, and few in number to fight much among ourselves. Also, we are too busy in our mission to prevent further loss of biodiversity and ecosystem decline. Our overriding goal in setting the geography and exploring restoration within it has been to provide the region’s first general text on the art, science, and practice of ecological restoration. Thus, this book attempts to cover the large sweep of Northwest ecosystems and leaves the finer details to others.

The book is divided into three sections. The shortest, Part I, The Big Picture, contains Chapter 1, Northwest Environmental Geography and History, and Chapter 2, Ecological Restoration. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview in order to set the stage for a more detailed understanding of regional restoration. Chapter 2 is primarily a summary of general principles of ecological restoration that are applied regionally and internationally, with a focus on terms, definitions, and approaches developed by the Society for Ecological Restoration International. Together these two chapters address issues that otherwise would have been repeated in most or all other chapters.

Part II, Pacific Northwest Ecosystems, lumps a very large and diverse region into nine major ecosystem types. These only partly correspond to more systematized classifications. Ecosystem classifications are always somewhat subjective and depend on the expected end use. For example, Robert Bailey’s ecoregional classification system for the United States includes domains, divisions, provinces, and sections at increasing levels of detail. The Bailey system lumps conifer forests and alpine meadows together, but we have separate chapters for each (see www.fs.fed.us/land/ecosysmgmt/ecoregl_home). It also includes a Pacific lowland mixed conifer forest zone to describe the Georgia Trough (British Columbia) to Willamette Valley (Oregon) area that includes prairie and oak habitats and a large number of wetlands and riparian woodlands. Bailey’s intermountain semidesert province corresponds quite well with our Sagebrush Steppe chapter.

British Columbia’s bio-geoclimatic classification system combines vegetation, soils, and climate, whereas their ecoregion classification integrates terrestrial and marine environments. This system breaks things down much more finely than does Bailey and may be one of the most sophisticated ecosystem classifications in North America, if not the world (www.gov.bc.ca/ecology/ecoregions/ecoclass). Bio-geoclimatic zones are named for climax plant communities, with gradients for subzones that go from dry to wet, hot to cold, and degree of maritime influence.

The U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy both rely on plant associations to describe ecosystems, starting with dominant overstories and working down through understory variations. The Forest Service has created hundreds of classifications across its domain. For example, in Mt. Hood National Forest there are twenty classifications for understory associations in the western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) zone (Halverson et al. 1986). The Forest Service uses classifications as environmental indicators, initially to guide logging and reforestation but now for many purposes, including restoration.

Thus, Chapter 5, Old-Growth Forests, can be applied to dozens of variations found west of the Cascades and British Columbia Coast ranges and potentially inclusive of inland maritime forests in Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. The nine ecosystems encompassed in this section are intended to apply to most ecological restoration projects across the region. Unfortunately, some ecosystems that are the subject of restoration attention, such as coastal sand dunes, have been left out. Each of the nine merits a full book in order to be treated in sufficient detail. One of these ecosystems, interior forests, already has been published as a full book, Mimicking Nature’s Fire (by Stephen Arno and Carl Fiedler, 2005), which covers a much larger region than the Pacific Northwest.

The nine ecosystem types profiled are bunchgrass prairies, oak woodlands and savannas, old-growth conifer forests, riparian woodlands, freshwater wetlands, tidal wetlands, interior forests, sagebrush steppe, and mountain ecosystems. Broad as it is, this list misses much of the restoration story, so we also chose to address restoration topics or challenges that often involve more than one ecosystem or that may influence restoration in any. These are profiled in Part III, Crossing Boundaries, and include urban natural areas, streams, watersheds, wildlife, invasive species, and traditional ecological knowledge. Through these chapters, a larger ecological restoration narrative is told, to a great extent more cultural and less technical. These topics tend to cut across or encompass the ecosystem types profiled in Part II. For example, many Northwest streams originate in mountain ecosystems, flow down through interior or old-growth forests, then are bordered by riparian woodlands and empty into an estuary. Their watershed context may include prairies, oak woodlands, and urban areas. Multiple invasive species may be encountered along the way. Wildlife reintroduction and barrier removal contribute to conservation efforts. And part of the restoration planning may rely on traditional ecological knowledge.

As Eric Higgs expresses so well in his Foreword, all of the contributors to this book have high hopes that it will advance the field of restoration in the region and perhaps elsewhere. By tackling Northwest restoration in a comprehensive way, across a range of ecosystem types and topics, this book will help practitioners, policymakers, agencies, communities, landowners, and students connect more dots as they contemplate a restoration project, program, business, or career. We see it not as the first word, which has already been spoken through many of the efforts documented in these pages, and certainly not as the last word because there is so much to be learned and written. Instead, we see is as a foundation on which to build. Please let us know if we have succeeded.

REFERENCES

Arno, S. F. and C. E. Fiedler. 2005. Restoring Nature’s Fire. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Halverson, N. M., C. Topik, and R. Van Vickie. 1986. Plant Association and Management Guide for the Western Hemlock Zone, Mt. Hood National Forest. U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region, Portland, OR.

Packard, S. and C. F. Mutel. 2005. The Tallgrass Restoration Handbook for Prairies, Savannas, and Woodlands. Island Press, Washington, DC.

PART I

The Big Picture

Part I consists of just two chapters, but they lay a foundation for all that will follow. The first, titled Northwest Environmental Geography and History, provides a regional overview, a discussion of biogeography and environmental history, a summary of restoration practice, and a brief discussion of the state of the art of ecological restoration.

These subjects are all worthy of book-length treatments. The intent is not to be comprehensive but to provide a context for readers who lack detailed knowledge about the regional environment of the Pacific Northwest. Readers who have more detailed knowledge than this author might want to skip ahead.

Chapter 2, Ecological Restoration, is a general introduction to the development of restoration practice and includes summaries of some of the key concepts that international leaders of the field, particularly those in the Society for Ecological Restoration International, have generated in the past few years. These include the current definition of ecological restoration, discussion of the expected attributes of restored ecosystems, and the reasons why restoration is needed. This discussion will be of particular value to policymakers and restoration advocates. Too often the word restoration is thrown around casually. I recall one visit to a wildlife refuge where a former farm field, planted with a few oak saplings and seeded to native grasses, was presented as a restored white oak savanna. I tried to hold my tongue but couldn’t. Readers who have not been steeped in the past 15–20 years of restoration conferences, journal articles, debates about definitions, and intellectual development in the field also will benefit from this chapter. The process of ecological restoration, from goal setting and project planning through monitoring and adaptive management, is discussed in many subsequent chapters but explored here in greater depth.

Chapter 1

Northwest Environmental Geography and History

DEAN APOSTOL

It is not bragging to claim that the Pacific Northwest is one of the world’s most spectacular regions. Our mountains and glaciers would make the Swiss envious, and our jagged, rocky coast washed by crashing ocean surf is the equal of New Zealand, Norway, or western Ireland. Our old-growth conifer forests have some of the world’s tallest trees and highest levels of biomass. The vast sagebrush steppe is a land of national park-scale superlatives. One of the least populated places in North America, it boasts the deepest canyon (Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River) and largest natural fault (Steens Mountain) on the continent.

Our human history and cultural development are equally impressive and fascinating. Northwest Indians attained a unique and very sophisticated level of art and culture that reflected the material abundance of the land and sea. The journals of Lewis and Clark reveal the land as it was before Euro-Americans set about changing it. Pioneers on the Oregon Trail bypassed nearly 3,000 miles of central continent to reach Oregon Country, rich in fish, farmland, and forest. Today’s farmers continue to cultivate deep, rich alluvial Willamette Valley soils, reaping harvests of grain, fruit, and vegetables. The sparse soils of the Oregon Coast Range and eastern Washington produce some of the highest-quality wine grapes anywhere.

Much has been written about the geography and history of the Pacific Northwest, and this chapter can offer only a modest summary. As illustrated in Plate 1 in the color insert, Cascadia spans the middle to northerly temperate latitudes, from around 40 degrees south (northern California) to nearly 60 degrees north (the southern mainland of Alaska). Marine air over the northern Pacific Ocean fights a timeless war with continental air masses, each taking charge at different times of the year. West of the Cascade and Coastal mountain ranges, the Pacific usually has the upper hand, while to the east the drier continental system rules. Lands in the south, particularly the Siskiyou-Klamath Mountain subregion, are much drier than the north, especially in summer, when a blessed high-pressure system parks itself over the ocean off the Oregon coast. The climate is maritime in the north, increasingly Mediterranean in the south, and continental in the east, with a great number of intermediate zones and microclimates between them (Goble and Hirt 1999, Franklin and Dyrness 1973).

The Pacific Northwest is also shaped by three large geologic forces: tectonics, volcanoes, and glaciers. Ocean plates grind under the continent, shoving, melting, and lifting rock. The result is a geologically young land, formed of materials drawn from the ocean depths and reborn through volcanic action. Significant amounts of exotic terrain collided with the continent from great distances over a period of 200 million years and formed parts of the lands west of Idaho (Alt and Hyndman 1995). Generally the terrain in the east is older than that farther west. The rocks of the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains in the southwestern part of the region are the exception, having arrived more than 200 million years ago, now jumbled into a chaotic heap (Trail 1998).

Elevation ranges are substantial, from sea level to more than 4,000 meters. Southeastern Alaska, the west coast of British Columbia, and the Olympic Peninsula include the wettest places in North America, whereas the sagebrush steppe, in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, is characterized by arid plains. Diverse ecosystems are distributed across this terrain, responding to elevation, rainfall, underlying geology, soils, aspect, and cultural influences. An island mountain archipelago reaches south from Alaska, down the British Columbia coast, and through Puget Sound. Vancouver Island, at more than 32,000 square kilometers, is the largest island along North America’s Pacific Coast. The Queen Charlotte Islands, or Haida Gwai, have been called the Canadian Galá-pagos, reflecting their remoteness from the main continent. Over the past 2 million years, successive advances and retreats of glaciers have also carved and shaped the landscape. The last retreat of the continental ice sheets was only some 12,000 years ago (the ice was 5,000 feet thick at the Washington-British Columbia border), and the Northwest remains a land with many glaciers.

Ecosystem Biogeography

Topographic complexity and proximity to the northern Pacific Ocean combine to create very diverse assemblages of plants and animals. The Northwest has tremendous landscape diversity over a fairly small area, a function of numerous mountain chains and quite variable precipitation, including some of the wettest and driest areas on the continent. Drive 200 miles in any direction from nearly any point in the region and you will experience significant ecosystem change, possibly more than anywhere else on the North American continent. Plant communities tend to run in north-south rather than east-west gradients, reflecting the orientation of major mountain ranges. West of the major mountains is the largest temperate rainforest in the world (Franklin and Dyrness 1973). In southeast Alaska, where the climate is cool and very wet even in summer, Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), and yellow cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) are the dominant overstory trees. Perched peat bogs, or muskegs, with lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) are also increasingly common in the north (Pojar and MacKinnon 1994). Rivers and streams teem with salmon. Farther south, in British Columbia, western redcedar (Thuja plicata) becomes increasingly dominant, and Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) occupies more inland sites. Farther south along the coast, summer air temperatures warm, and as a consequence dense fogs form. Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirons ) become a key component of the forest. Prairies, or grass balds, increase in frequency on coastal headlands farther south as well, adding diversity to the extensive forest matrix (Franklin and Dyrness 1973; Chapter 5).

Inland valleys, particularly the Georgia Straight-Puget Trough of Washington and the Willamette Valley of Oregon, are in the rain shadow of coastal mountains and therefore are much drier, which has allowed them to support bunchgrass prairies and Garry oak (Quercus garryana ) woodland ecosystems (Chapters 3 and 4). Farther east the mountains rise to heights well above the tree line, with rich meadows, huckleberry fields, and subalpine parklands forming below and around the many glaciers (Chapter 11). North of Mt. Rainier, the tree line drops lower and parklands become more extensive than in the south (Chapter 11). East of the mountains a second rain shadow, a characteristic of the north-south mountain orientation, causes the forests to quickly change from hemlock to fir to pine and eventually to open up onto the vast sagebrush steppe of the interior Northwest (Chapters 9 and 10).

This geography includes the most extensive network of salmon-bearing streams on the planet (Chapter 13). All the major mammals of the North American continent still find homes in the region: grizzlies, wolves, lynx, cougars, bison, moose, elk, and many more (Chapter 15). It is a rich and beautiful environment that continues to attract tourists and immigrants from around the world, even while holding its native born close by.

A Very Brief Environmental and Ecological History

Although there is some dispute over exact dates, the evidence clearly shows that humans have been part of the Pacific Northwest landscape for at least 10,000 years and probably longer. Kennewick Man, whose remains were discovered along the Columbia River shore, has been dated at more than 8,000 years old (Burke Museum 2005). The last retreat of glaciers 12,000–20,000 years ago allowed development of forests over much of the western part of the region, although the composition and structure we are familiar with today settled into place much later (Schoonmaker et al. 1997, Goble and Hirt 1999). Retreat of the glaciers was followed by a warm, dry climate that favored the northward spread of oaks and the westward movement of Douglas fir. Sagebrush steppe vegetation reached much farther west than at present, all the way to the western end of the Fraser River Valley. Then the climate cooled and became wetter, favoring hemlock and cedar and resulting in shrinkage of the range of oaks. There is speculation, but not physical evidence, that this may be the time when Northwest Indian people developed fire management of prairies and oak woodlands in interior valleys, which allowed them to persist even after a cooling of the climate should have resulted in their overtake by forest.

The pattern and distribution of forests, oak woodlands, prairies, streams, steppe, and wetlands that Lewis and Clark traveled through in the early nineteenth century had been in place only for 4,000–5,000 years. Forests were part of an ever-shifting mosaic that responded to periods of drought and large wildfires (Agee 1993). Rivers flooded, changed course, and created dynamic riparian zones, sometimes with enormous log jams (Ecotrust 2002). But the basic distribution of major vegetation communities was fixed, with only small further shifts at the margins.

Indian people interacted with this pattern and affected it in many ways. Level terraces along rivers and estuaries were cleared and occupied as village sites. Northwest Indians were skilled woodworkers and harvested trees and planks for canoes, building materials, tools, and weapons. Brush was gathered for firewood, basketry, and other uses. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) was the tree of life, used for everything from roofing to baby diapers and menstrual pads. Most importantly, almost every major ecosystem type in the region was shaped in part by Indian fire (Boyd 2000). Prairies and oak and pine woodlands were burned on a frequent basis, with forests underburned less frequently. Small clearings were made to attract game animals, even in the far northern coastal areas. Huckleberry patches and travel corridors in the mountains were also burned. There is little question that all of this burning had a profound effect on regional ecosystems (Chapter 17).

Plants were gathered in great numbers. Some, such as camas, may have been transplanted deliberately and managed to increase abundance (Boyd 2000). Salmon was the main food source for people far into the interior of the Columbia Basin. Harvest techniques included construction of weirs to funnel fish into shallow areas where they could be trapped and harvested more easily.

Development of sea trading by captains Vancouver, Gray, and others, Lewis and Clark’s journey, the development of the beaver trade, missionaries, and thousands of pioneers seeking new land initiated profound social and environmental changes in the region. Diseases such as measles and smallpox reduced Indian populations by as much as 90% in some areas, beginning in the late eighteenth century (Schoonmaker et al. 1997). This catastrophe probably disrupted burning cycles and caused abandonment of villages, contributing to the pioneer impression that the Northwest was only lightly populated or unsettled (Robbins 1997).

Widespread trapping of beavers by agents of Hudson’s Bay Company, designed in part to create a beaver desert that would discourage competitors, had profound effects on streams and wetlands all across the region (Lichatowich 1999). Only recently have ecologists begun to appreciate the critical role beavers play in sustaining complex aquatic and riparian habitats. Farmers settled and plowed the most fertile prairie soils first, then quickly spread to oak woodlands and prairie margins. Forests were cleared, cities were platted and built at the heads of deepwater navigation, and dredging of the Willamette and other rivers converted highly complex, braided systems to simple channels that could accommodate large vessels. By 1895, an estimated 50% of the bottomland hardwood forests of the Willamette Valley had been converted to agriculture, and the riparian conifers were almost completely gone (Hulse et al. 2000). Dikes were built along estuaries and lowlands, with wetlands ditched and drained. Intensive logging began along streams and rivers in the lower mountain reaches. On smaller streams, such as those in the Oregon Coast Range, splash dams temporarily backed water up to corral logs, which were then dynamited, releasing a torrent downstream that tore out natural log jams and sluiced riverbeds down to bedrock (Ecotrust 2002).

Early Northwest Euro-American settlers, loggers, and town builders for the most part had little understanding and less regard for native ecosystems or native people. They saw the region as a vast wilderness and saw their job as taming it and bringing it to heel. Government surveyors laid out a straight-lined grid of townships, sections, and range, initially stopping only where the land was considered unsuitable for farming or town building. The few remaining Indians were herded off to remote reservations on land white people did not want, at least at first. Over time most of these lands were confiscated as well. Fish, particularly salmon, were harvested with no thought of sustaining them, and population declines were well documented by the late nineteenth century (Lichatowich 1999).

Indian and pioneer trails became muddy farm-to-market roads, some surfaced with planks. Plank roads were later straightened and finally paved. Logging moved deeper into the forests along temporary railroads, then migrated upslope as trucks became the preferred transportation mode. The U.S. Forest Service, first established as a guardian of watersheds, got into the logging business in a big way in the 1950s to help feed the postwar housing boom and make up for depleted private forests. Logging revenues were used to build a powerful agency. British Columbia forests, 90% of which are owned by the Crown, have followed a similar path, although they trailed a few decades behind the U.S. logging curve. Clearcutting, at first shunned by foresters trained in European methods and a timber industry interested only in the highest-value trees, became the preferred harvest technique. It proved to be more efficient than selective cutting and allowed quick reforestation with sun-loving Douglas fir, the fastest-growing and most valuable tree in the much of the region. East of the mountains in the pine woodlands Indian fire was stopped, natural fires suppressed, and selective logging of old-growth pine initiated. Shade-tolerant fir trees quickly occupied the ground and filled in, and at first foresters were delighted (Arno and Fiedler 2005; Chapter 9).

High mountain meadows were grazed by armies of sheep and herded great distances to market. Millions of cattle were let loose on the unfenced, previously lightly grazed sagebrush steppe, resulting in a severe loss of native bunchgrasses (Chapter 10). Invasive species, some brought in accidentally, others on purpose, hitched rides into the Northwest with the new settlers. Hundreds of large and small dams were built for hydropower and flood control. At first they were mainly in upper tributaries, but some were near tidal zones, such as the Elwha on the Olympic Peninsula (Lichatowich 1999).

Ecological losses have only recently begun to be tallied. Old-growth conifer forests west of the Cascades, the most studied ecosystem in the Northwest, now cover only 10–15% of the presettlement extent in Oregon and Washington, with higher amounts remaining in British Columbia and southeast Alaska (Chapter 6). Interior pine forests have all been degraded by fire suppression, grazing, and logging. Tens of thousands of miles of roads, most very poorly built, prone to failure, with fish-blocking culverts, are laced through forested mountains. Bunchgrass prairies west of the Cascades are down to a tiny fragile fraction of their original extent (Chapter 3). Oak woodlands, though still occupying roughly the same area, have been severely disrupted by fire suppression and grazing, their understory communities most highly affected (Chapter 4). Freshwater wetlands have been reduced by 50%, or even more in densely settled places such as the Willamette Valley, the Puget Sound, and along the Fraser River (Chapter 7). Tidal wetlands have been substantially reduced along the Oregon and Washington coasts (Chapter 8). Riparian woodlands have been affected all across the region, particularly in lowland agricultural valleys and urban areas. The Columbia and Snake rivers, once the world’s greatest producers of salmon, have become a series of warm water lakes except for a short stretch that runs past one of the most environmentally contaminated lands in North America, the nuclear reservation at Hanford, Washington. Fifty Columbia River salmon stocks have become extinct, and the remaining twenty-five are on a very expensive life support system (Lichatowich 1999). Urban streams have been buried in culverts, channelized, subjected to huge pulses of water from impervious surfaces, and polluted with oil, gasoline, and assorted street gunk (Booth 1991).

Despite the highly touted reputation of the Pacific Northwest across much of the continent and world as an Ecotopia, the sad reality is that only fragments of natural ecosystems are left. This region has been logged, farmed, urbanized, roaded, grazed, drained, and dammed a lot more than many realize. Most conservationists’ attention has been on preserving the remaining natural fragments of old-growth forests and roadless areas. Watershed, stream, and riparian protection have received increasing attention as a consequence of salmon decline. But the case has just begun to be made for spending significant resources on ecological restoration. Local economies and governments still struggle to recover from the dot-com bust and relentless antitax campaigns. Federal and provincial land management agencies, responsible for more than half the land in the region, have been decimated by staff reductions resulting directly from reduced logging revenues. Additionally, they are not yet staffed for a restoration mission, and the existing policy framework provides inconsistent direction that bounces from serving the natural resource extraction beast to protecting and restoring ecosystems. State and local agencies also lack staff expertise and reliable funding sources for restoration, although programs are maturing across the region.

Northwest Restoration Summary

Salmon, Rivers, and Watersheds

Most regional policy and funding attention has been on restoration of streams and watersheds, aimed primarily at improving conditions for wild salmon and trout. The results of more than two decades of restorative work are mixed. Although fifty populations of Columbia Basin salmon are extinct, salmon have returned to the Umatilla River in eastern Oregon after 70 years of absence, a result of a cooperative restoration project led by the Umatilla Indians that allowed water formerly diverted for irrigation to remain in the river. To do this, a deal was made to substitute Columbia River water to irrigators (Umatilla Indian Reservation Web Site). Although twenty-six separate Columbia Basin wild salmon and steelhead populations have been listed as threatened or endangered since 1991, no further extinctions have been recorded since the 1980s. Nevertheless, twenty-five of the twenty-six are continuing to decline in population (NOAA 2005, Sheets 2004). Increases widely reported in the media over the past few years have been primarily hatchery-bred, not wild fish.

It is estimated that historically, 10–14 million native adult salmon returned to the Columbia Basin each year. Natural salmon runs are now less than 5% of these historic levels (Sheets 2004). Dams have been identified as the main cause of this decline, although harvest levels, set too high because of an abundance of hatchery fish, also have played an important role. In the Siuslaw Basin on the central Oregon coast, reliable estimates indicate that historically more than 200,000 coho salmon returned in an average year. Now the number is around 4,000, despite the general absence of dams on the Siuslaw. High ocean harvest levels, habitat loss from logging, valley bottom farming, and the historic legacy of splash dams reduced coho habitat and abundance in the Siuslaw. Chinook salmon, which spend less time in degraded rivers and more in the ocean, remain at or near historic levels (Ecotrust 2002).

Salmon populations in the Columbia Basin are approximately where they were in 1986: two and half million adult fish, 80% of which are of hatchery origin (Sheets 2004). Bonneville Power has been spending an average of US$250 million per year on salmon recovery, of which only 15% goes for habitat restoration. This level of funding is $147 million below what the Northwest Power and Conservation Council recommended over the 2001–2003 period (Sheets 2004). In a 2001 review of the four major salmon recovery programs the Independent Scientific Advisory Board concluded that the probability of successful recovery, even assuming faithful implementation, was low (ISAB 2001).

Nevertheless, a lot has been learned about stream habitat restoration in the past two decades. In particular, the role of complex structure provided by large wood and the importance of periodic floods to reshape channels have helped biologists move from trying to engineer habitat (rocks, cables, gabions fixed in place) to working more with natural processes. A better understanding of the relationship between sediment delivery, storage, and transport, which some fishery ecologists call the stream digestion process, also helps (Ecotrust 2002). This has led to more attention on controlling upland sediment sources than on fixing downstream habitat. In some areas, restoration results have been very positive, with some stream systems such as Kennedy Flats on Vancouver Island showing impressive recovery after a decade of active restoration. In others, such as the Mattole River on northern California’s lost coast, nearly two decades of intensive and extensive efforts appear only to have stabilized the aquatic ecosystem, but a culture of restoration has become firmly rooted (Chapter 14). Region wide, we may be nearing the bottom of the trough, and the suite of new protection policies, combined with restorative action, may stem further decline or extinctions but may still not be near enough to result in significant recovery.

Forests and Woodlands

The first significant shock to the perception of the Northwest as an ecological Shangri-La was delivered by the listing of the northern spotted owl as an endangered species in 1990. Up to that point, old-growth conifer forests were seen as timber bank accounts to pay for schools and roads and to provide jobs in rural areas. It took a prolonged and concerted effort by a few stubborn local environmental organizations, eventually supported by national ones, to call attention to what was being lost. It also took the pathbreaking research of Dr. Jerry Franklin and his colleagues, affiliated with the Pacific Northwest Research Station and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, to discover the unique and complex ecology of old growth. By the time President Clinton initiated the Northwest Forest Plan, old-growth forests in Washington, Oregon, and northern California were down to a fraction of their presettlement range. Vancouver Island in British Columbia also has very little old growth left. Restoration of old growth at first appears to be an oxymoron because we think of these as completely natural or primeval ecosystems that have no human influence. Yet foresters at the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are now tackling the restoration challenge using variable thinning in young forest plantations to begin to build back structural and ecological complexity that the old forests exhibit.

Restoring interior Northwest forests, primarily Ponderosa pine, is a very different challenge. Foresters have slowly come to appreciate the critical role that frequent fire played in keeping these ecosystems healthy and in many cases are now combining selective logging with fire to recreate the open, parklike structure that pine forests once had.

Much recent effort has gone into restoring riparian woodlands in forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes and increasing regulatory protection of remaining riparian forests. It appears that progress is being made. Riparian areas are hospitable environments for plants, and one can start some species such as cottonwood and willows by simply jamming live stakes into the soil. A key challenge in riparian areas is competition from invasive species. Japanese knotweed in particular appears to have exploded in its distribution along regional streams over the past few years.

Oak woodlands are generally thought to be in poor condition, although there are no reliable inventories that document the full extent. Oak advocates generally believe that 100% of Oregon white and Garry oak savannas from British Columbia to the southern end of the Willamette Valley have been lost or significantly degraded by farming, urban development, and fire suppression. In many cases the grand old oaks are still there, but the understory communities have been lost. Fortunately, a budding oak restoration community has sprung up, led by an informally organized, somewhat anarchic Oregon oak woodland group in the Willamette Valley and a more disciplined Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team in British Columbia. These groups are populated by nature nerds from local and federal agencies, progressive landowners, and the odd independent consultant. Oak restoration efforts are taking place across the entire ecological range, from northern California up through Oregon and Washington, reaching into Vancouver Island and spreading east through the Fraser River Valley and Columbia Gorge.

Freshwater wetlands have been the target of restoration, or at least mitigation work, for decades. What started as creation of simple duck donuts has evolved into complex approaches working with site hydrology and multiple plant communities. Restoring wetlands is still very challenging and will remain so, but there is no question that both the art and the science have improved. There remains the question of whether we are gaining or losing acreage because most wetland restoration is still compensating for ongoing wetland destruction.

Restoring tidal wetlands is a more recent undertaking, driven largely by efforts to protect salmon. Dike breaching or removal has proved quite successful at initiating restoration, but in most cases it takes years of tidal action for marsh systems to rebound.

The sagebrush steppe ecosystem of the Northwest interior has been the focus of restoration work by the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies. There have been no comprehensive reviews on the status of restoration across the region, so it is difficult to know whether overall degradation has stabilized or decline continues. Restorative efforts are showing success on a site-by-site basis, but we are probably still losing ground to the cheatgrass-wildfire cycle (S. Link, personal communication, 2005).

State of the Art

One initial goal of this book, to describe the state of the art of ecological restoration, turned out to be impossible to meet. The practice of regional restoration is gaining such strong momentum, with new projects being planned and implemented every day, that the learning curve is too steep to capture. Thus a book like this one, more than 5 years in the making, finds itself chasing an ever-growing catalogue of projects and a rapidly expanding knowledge base. A secondary goal, which we believe has been better achieved, was to profile the wide range of restoration projects in progress, embed them in a geographic context, and raise the bar on restoration practice. In case studies presented throughout Parts II and III, we have gathered what we believe to be the best of the best. This book should encourage students, practitioners, and poll-cymakers engaged in ecological restoration to reach high and not settle for mediocrity. We believe that every ecosystem profiled in this book can be restored or, rather, put on the path to restoring itself. We are just beginning to reach a point of knowledge, civic attention, and funding sufficient to support real gains. Governments, communities, and private landowners all across the region are working at ecological restoration, and if this effort is able to prevent further loss, the next generation will begin to make substantive gains.

REFERENCES

Agee, J. A. 1993. Fire Ecology of the Pacific Northwest. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Alt, D. and D. W. Hyndman. 1995. Northwest Exposures: A Geologic Story of the North West. Mountain Press, Missoula, MT.

Arno, S. and C. Fiedler. 2005. Mimicking Nature’s Fire. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Booth, D. 1991. Urbanization and the natural drainage system: impacts, solutions and prognosis. Northwest Environmental Journal 7: 93–118.

Boyd, R. 2000. Indians, Fire, and the Pacific Northwest. Oregon State University, Corvallis.

Burke Museum Web Site: www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/kman/kman_home.

Ecotrust. 2002. Siuslaw River Watershed Assessment. Unpublished report available at www.inforain.org/dataresources/.

Franklin, J. F. and C. T. Dyrness. 1973. Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station. GTR PNW-8. USDA Forest Service, Portland, OR.

Goble, D. D. and P. W. Hirt. 1999. Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples. University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Hulse, D., S. Gregory, and J. Baker. 2000. Willamette River Basin Atlas, Trajectories of Environmental and Ecological Change. Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium. Corvallis: Oregon State University. Available at www.fsl.orst.edu/pnwerc/wrb/Atlas_web_compressed/PDFtoc.html.

ISAB (Independent Scientific Advisory Board). 2001. A Review of Salmon Recovery Strategies for the Columbia Basin. Available at www.nwcouncil.org/library/isab2001.

Lichatowich, J. 1999. Salmon without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis. Island Press, Washington, DC.

NOAA. 2005. National Marine Fisheries salmon status reviews and status review updates. Available at www.nwr.noaa.gov/lsalmon/salmesa/pubs.

Pojar, J. and A. MacKinnon. 1994. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. British Columbia Ministry of Forests and Lone Pine Publishing, Vancouver.

Robbins, W. G. 1997. Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story 1800–1940. University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Schoonmaker, P. K., B. von Hagen, and E. C. Wolf. 1997. The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Sheets, E. W. 2004. Restoring salmon: how are we doing? Open Spaces. Views from the Northwest 7(1). Portland, OR. Available at www.open-spaces.conl/issue-v7n1.php.

Trail, P. 1998. Recognizing paradise: the world discovers the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion. Jefferson Monthly Magazine 22(2).

Umatilla Indian Reservation Web Site. n.d. Salmon Success in the Umatilla River. Available at www.umatilla.nsn.us/umariver.html.

Chapter 2

Ecological Restoration

DEAN APOSTOL

The art and science of ecological restoration have come a long way from their origins. Historic threads of restoration include land management by traditional people, the writings of George Perkins Marsh (Man and Nature), reforestation and soil conservation in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including the work of Arthur Sampson in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains), the naturalist school of landscape architecture inspired by Jens Jensen in the upper Midwest, Aldo Leopold and Theodore Sperry’s efforts to transplant prairie sod at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s, wetland mitigation projects spawned by the U.S. Federal Clean Water Act in the 1970s, and multiple stream and salmon enhancement projects over many decades in the Northwest (Berger 1990, Hall 1997). The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) knit many of these threads together in 1987, has since grown to include members from thirty-seven nations, and has added the modifier International to its name (SERI).

Many of the contributors to this volume expressed a desire to include background information on ecological restoration as a way of qualifying their discussions. Rather than have each team do this, we decided to create this chapter to address broad restoration definitions and issues that are consistent across ecosystem types and projects. Most of the information, unless noted otherwise, is drawn directly from SER online publications, particularly the SER International Primer (2004) and the Guidelines for Developing and Managing Ecological Restoration Projects (Clewell et al. 2000). The reader of this book is encouraged to read these for greater detail and insights. As online documents, they may be updated from time to time because restoration research and practice are evolving rapidly.

Defining Ecological Restoration

After more than a decade of debate, SERI settled on the following definition: Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. This is an elegant definition that was wrestled to the mat by a number of dedicated restoration practitioners and scholars (Higgs 2003). It is important to note that restoration ecology is defined as the science that provides concepts, models, and methods, whereas ecological restoration is the practice that puts knowledge in place. Because restoration is still young, overlaps a number of fields, and has not developed an extensive academic infrastructure, there is a lot of synergy between practice and science. Unlike in other fields, it is often the practitioners who are leading the science and academics by documenting, experimenting, and adapting rather than the other way around.

In the late 1980s the debate over defining restoration centered on the balance between mitigation and restoration. Midwest prairie and oak ecologists and legions of volunteers had been at work since the 1970s trying to replicate as closely as possible the historic composition and structure of ecosystems that were down to their last small remnants (Stevens 1995). In the meantime, the Clean Water Act spawned a wetland mitigation industry that had bureaucratic, commercial, and professional interests and a lot of money at stake. The motivations, resources, and expectations of these two camps were and still are quite different, so the argument over what constitutes restoration became political and almost theological as well as scientific. The more people grappled with the question of what restoration is, the more complicated the debate became (Figures 2.1 and