Little River Restoration Support

We completed restoration actions on Little River, a tributary to the Elwha River. Little River is an important tributary and one of the first habitats upstream of the recently removed Elwha Dam. Little River has already been colonized by several species of Pacific salmon including ESA-listed Puget Sound Chinook, Puget Sound steelhead and bull trout as well as coho and pink salmon. The lower portions of Little River are located outside of Olympic National Park and have been subjected to historic logging impacts dating back to the late 1800s. As a result, Little River has lost most of its in-channel large woody material and the channel was degraded . Primary impacts include channel incision, loss of pools, bed coarsening and loss of spawning gravels, disconnection from its floodplain, and loss of off channel habitats. To improve spawning and rearing habitat we implemented structural placement of LWD at 78 locations from river mile 0.2-1.5 using a combination of ground based and helicopter methods. After one winter those wood placement sites have already trapped significant volumes of gravel, aggrading the bed, and are providing improved habitat for spawning and rearing.

We propose to restore habitat in a 1.5 mile reach of Little River by placing wood in complex habitat structures at 86 locations. Little River restoration has been designed to improve spawning and rearing conditions for chinook, coho, pink and chum salmon as well as steelhead and bull trout. Three of those populations (Chinook, steelhead and bull trout) are listed as threatened under Endangered Species Act. Restoration actions are expected to increase pool area, complex cover, improve spawning habitat and increase floodplain connectivity. The current morphology of Little River is uniformly plain-bed and characterized by low pool-frequency and cobble substrate largely unsuitable for spawning. Restoration actions will change Little River morphology to forced pool-riffle habitat that will contain a diversity of spawning and rearing habitat.