One generalized yet sweeping example of how the added gravel has failed... is that by placing more gravel in the river, the river has become too shallow in many areas which once were prime spawning areas.
The engineering and sustainability of the project was not well thought out.
Here is ONE specific example...
During a fishing excursion in the fall of 2014, I came upon the excavation/grading/gravel enhancement crew below the Arden/Goethe Bridge. I took some photos of the equipment in action and eventually crossed the bridge to get back to my car.
There was a PR guy in a suit with a DWR badge and another guy sporting his BOR credentials.
I asked them some questions and their answers made it unmistakably-clear that they hadn't a clue about the river, anadromous fish, or habitat restoration.
I asked them... "So tell me, what happens when the water recedes, the AR flows fall out and the side channel becomes too shallow for fish to spawn in? His answer was, "Oh that won't happen, calculations have been made, blah, blah, blah...
Fast Forward to 2015:
So, not only did the side channel become unapproachable to fish and unable to provide viable spawning habitat by the next year, 2015... but in 2016 when we had extremely high flows, most of the gravel added to the main stem of the river was unearthed and redistributed to the head of the gravel bar island, and to the top and bottom of the walnut orchard run (adjacent to the Goethe Park Entrance on Rod Beaudry Drive) and into what was once a beautiful cross river tailout and riffle run of 4-6' deep water which hosted hundreds of spawning salmon and spawning/feeding steelhead every fall and winter.
Ask anyone who actually gets off their lazy ass (and off the boards) and actually walks and fishes the river... how that section has changed... Smitty? Jeff C? Aron? Kranhold? They'll be able to tell ya... that what was once a magnificent area to swing up (or indicator fish or gear fish) steelhead... is now rather barren. the tailouts are between 10inches and 3/4 ft in a typical flow year and the bank along the alders which used to provide a nice (cold water) resting place for traveling and spawning salmon and steelhead) has since filled in rendering it useless.
Look, I'm sure I come across to many as a know-it-all asshole and I really don't claim to be either... I just care deeply for the American River and its fish and wildlife. I think it is important to call out agencies who manage it and take to task the validity and legitimacy of their management decisions.
Last edited by STEELIES/26c3; 08-23-2019 at 02:41 PM.
and we all know how THIS one turned out....
ACTUALLY you would have to WALK and FISH the river REGULARLY to know...
Not to sound terse, but this entire posting is not remotely accurate and IMO seems completely agenda driven by your obvious need to “cultivate the Hate” for the DWR, DFW,etc. But when you literally start bashing the entities you love to hate for implementing restoration principles that have been known to produce results everywhere they’ve been utilized, you cross a line. Clearly you’re bashing the method also.
Habitat restoration and preservation is the only thing that has produced consistently favorable results amongst the efforts in anadromous salmonid restoration all along the west coast.
Gravel injection is a necessary part of geomorphic restoration where you have downstream sediment transport where a dam stops the potential for replenishment. This is NOT just about increasing available spawning substrate, but giving a river that has been highly channelized and typically has long stretches of large embedded, immobile substrate and few feathered edges to become somewhat alluvial again. SOME AREAS THAT ANGLERS FEEL ARE PRODUCTIVE ARE GOING TO BECOME LESS PRODUCTIVE. That's part of the process. It's the net overall positive results that drives fish response.
Feeding a river like the American gravel, combined with mechanical geomorphic restoration on a regular basis, in addition to creating more viable spawning habitat, exponentially increases the interstitial void spaces in the substrate which directly increases invert abundance (more forage) and also has the potential to increase invert diversity. It also eliminates adjacency issues when it fills in areas most anglers like yourself think is productive habitat. e.g. increasing the amount of zipped up fry that emerge from spawning gravel does nothing if those fry that haven’t even gulped enough air to fill their swim bladders have to search 100+ yards of predator infested river to find suitable fry rearing habitat.
Gravel injection offers numerous potential benefits that work synergistically together to significantly increase survival rates to the next life stage for all salmonids.
There is a mountain of data that proves geomorphic restoration works. Take the work spurred by the 2000 ROD for example. The amount of stream-born Chinook that survive to smoltification and hit the WC screw trap has literally increased several hundred percent over the pre-project baseline in several years. Note the manner in which they index Chinook abundance has changed a bit but these are absolutely HUGE, favorable results that are directly tied to habitat improvement.
If you look at O. Mykiss, pre-project, we were lucky if one in every four or five fish over the WC weir was stream-born. From 2008ish to present, stream-born fish in terms of run comp, have come to comprise significant and in several years, the majority of the escapement numbers. This isn’t just a favorable result, but IMO “Holy shit” levels of success, particularly when you take into account that the fish manifested these gains in multiple, back to back years of extreme drought that should have hammered in stream Mykiss production down to nothing.
These are also not performance measures based on assumption that may or may not be true, or angler rhetoric, but rather rock solid, direct fish response indicators based on results, not theory. Also keep in mind only a portion of the upper river has been restored.
These numbers have been so extremely favorable that the Trinity Hatchery has dropped O. Mykiss production from 800k fish per year (pre-project) down to a more reasonable 280K fish per year. Keep in mind Trinity isn’t an enhancement facility, it’s a mitigation facility.
This isn’t a waste of taxpayers money, or a foil and it’s definitely not creating any fallacies that there’s enough habitat to restore on a severely truncated river like the American that mothballing the Nimbus facility is a potential reality.
Nor is anyone involved, disillusioned that the stream-born fish this project produces are “wild” fish linked to eons of evolution honed survival strategies that work. They’re the progeny of hatchery products.
The truncated American is never going to have “significant” instream production, when compared to hatchery production. But does it significantly improve instream production? Hell yes it does, and hell yes they should be doing it regardless of the cost.
Respectfully, I'm not seeing many things specific about your specifics.
For instance: "There was a PR guy in a suit with a DWR badge and another guy sporting his BOR credentials. I asked them some questions and their answers made it unmistakably-clear that they hadn't a clue about the river, anadromous fish, or habitat restoration."
Someone who works in Public Relations realm of expertise is in formal communication, not ecology or biology or even in catching fish. What were the BOR guys credentials actually in? PR also? Do you really think there's a BOR staff ecologist or biologist that in reality knows nothing about riverine habitat or anadromous fish? You're making assumptions here.
Or here: "Ask anyone who actually gets off their lazy ass (and off the boards) and actually walks and fishes the river... how that section has changed... Smitty? Jeff C? Aron? Kranhold? They'll be able to tell ya... that what was once a magnificent area to swing up (or indicator fish or gear fish) steelhead... is now rather barren. the tailouts are between 10inches and 3/4 ft in a typical flow year and the bank along the alders which used to provide a nice (cold water) resting place for traveling and spawning salmon and steelhead) has since filled in rendering it useless."
The goal of restoration has nothing to do with your perception of whether a restored area has the same or increased "angler success". It has to do with fish response. In totality that's all that matters.
A "specific" would be looking at the "ZYX" river which has undergone geomorphic restoration with gravel injection for say 20 years.
It takes a few years for phases of restoration to get completed enough to have an impact AND a few more if you're using escapement data as a performance measure. Could be a few (1 or 2 for short, truncated rivers like the A) to several years (about 7 for a river like the T) depending of the length of the river and the portion being restored.
You then look at the data for the last 12 to 15 years. The majority of the "year data" shows decreases from pre-project "baseline" in terms of the STREAMBORN Chinook that are showing up in the screwtrap data. i.e. your Chinook outmigrant production is dropping not rising.
O. Mykiss escapement data shows that adult escapement has NOT trended towards a higher stream-born component and hatchery production has not increased.
That would be a SPECIFIC example where geomorphic restoration was failing.
Last edited by ycflyfisher; 08-23-2019 at 06:21 PM.
Thank you YC. I have nothing to add to your excellent and knowledgeable response. Nice to see something besides hate from people that are professionally in the field actually trying to remedy the screwed up rivers we've created.
YC knocked it out of the park with that response. I will add that all of these restoration projects are worthless without a flow regime that can cause geomorphic change. Luckily on the American, that happens fairly frequently. It took 40 years for it to happen on the Trinity.
I'll also say that adult escapement is one of the worse metrics for evaluating restoration work. Adult escapement is dependent on in-river survival as well as marine survival (fishing mortality). This is why most agencies really concentrate on juvenile monitoring since it is reflective of inriver conditions while avoiding the ocean black box conundrum. I've attached a nice picture from the TRRP showing the response of their actions (channel rehab, gravel augmentation, and geomorphic flows) on juvenile outmigrants. Notice the time scale on the graph is nearly 30 years. I'd be curious to see if there is a similar response on the American.
Mark, I'll say that your sentiment is not uncommon and I see it frequently. That PR guy should have put you in contact with the designers and don't be afraid to contact them, I'm sure they would be happy to explain most of their reasoning to you. I think you'll find most of the people actually planning and designing these projects are more similar to you than your typical government bureaucrats.
In the last 10-15 years that i have been fishing the American, The only time that I have seen a good number of Salmon come up is when they open the rivers back up for Salmon fishing. After closing them for, I believe to be 5 years?Maybe 3? Then we had another drought, witch slowly depleated the salmon & steel head population.
I'm not a big fan of the gravel restoration. They ruined one of the best runs on the American just below the Sunrise foot bridge. Since then we had a couple of big winters witch led Natomas to release 60,000 cfs one year changing some of the runs on the American. With that being said Iv'e had more success this year than in the past 4 years of fishing the American. I dont think its from gravel restoration. I havent seen a salmon roll or rise in this river in a long time. Not like the numbers we use to get. Hopefully this fall will be different!
see y'all on the river!
Thank you Fishtopher and YC. I'm glad there are fly fishing enthusiasts like yourself that are also dedicated professionals restoring our rivers destroyed by bad decisions made years ago during the dam building era of our state. Just because a gravel augmentation project has filled in your favorite run, doesn't mean it's a failure, like some people here think.
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