North Fork Deep Ck Stream Restoration Project

Metro is proposing to implement a habitat restoration project along North Fork Deep Creek in Boring, Oregon. The designs are based on the results of an existing conditions and site analysis and aim to take advantage of site opportunities to improve habitat conditions (i.e., create flow complexity including slower backwater features, side channels, sediment sorting/recruiting and pool scour, facilitate nutrient exchange along the floodplain). The project’s primary objective is to improve the complexity of aquatic habitats in North Fork Deep Creek to coho salmon, steelhead, cutthroat trout, and Pacific lamprey. The project is needed to mitigate for legacy impacts of channel simplification and upstream agricultural and urban impacts to improve habitat complexity and set the stream on a more positive trajectory. The project includes helicopter-placement of large wood structures, intended to improve habitat complexity and restart channel processes that create complex habitats, along North Fork Deep Creek. Project partners include Metro, Oregon State Parks, and Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife.

The Clackamas River Basin is designated as a focal recovery area for salmon and steelhead. The North Fork Deep Creek Project Reach is used for adult holding, spawning, and juvenile rearing by Coho salmon and steelhead while the Deep Creek Project Reach is used for spawning and rearing by Coho & Chinook salmon, steelhead, and Pacific lamprey. Fall and spring Chinook salmon are known to spawn in portions of the lower reach of Deep Creek (CRBC 2005). Migratory cutthroat trout are found in the Clackamas River’s larger tributaries including Deep Creek, which is known to support large numbers of spawning Coho salmon and steelhead, including naturally reproducing early-run winter steelhead. In fact, Deep Creek produces some of the highest numbers of out-migrating Coho salmon and the largest-sized juvenile Coho salmon in the Lower Clackamas basin which plays an important role in maintaining the population’s genetic and population diversity. Agricultural and residential land uses have fragmented forest habitats and altered the riparian corridor. Compared to historical conditions the forest patches are smaller, less connected, have less species diversity, and likely provide a younger forest seral stage due to historic and ongoing agricultural land uses practices. Development along the floodplain has reduced floodplain roughness and limited vegetative diversity reducing large wood input to the stream system. Restoring natural flows by incorporating large wood structures into the channel will increase habitat complexity and cover; help restore and provide access to spawning gravel beds; and promote the creation of complex pool, side channel, refugia, and rearing habitat.