2016 Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund: Lower South Fork Grays Restoration Project

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe enhanced spawning and rearing habitat for winter steelhead and coho by installing engineered log jams throughout 0.6 miles of the lower South Fork Grays River and 900 of Blaney Creek in Pacific County. The logjams will allow stable island formation, provide local cover, foster mature flood plain forest, and encourage sediment sorting and deposition. Riparian re-planting efforts completed in early 2019 will provide long term shade and wood supply for the reach. This project combined two highly ranked projects from 2010 Grays River Habitat Restoration Technical Report published by the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board. The report authors note that this project provides substantial on-site benefits to habitat, while simultaneously addressing high levels of sediment delivery to downstream Grays River reaches critical to steelhead, coho, chum, and fall Chinook. This is the implementation phase of a design project funded by the Washington Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) in 2013. The Tribe used this grant to match a SRFB grant (RCO #16-1534) for project implementation, and has pro-rated project metrics between the two funding sources to prevent double-counting in the PCSRF database. Tribe, RCO, and PCSRF staff have discussed and agreed to divide metrics between funding pathways to prevent redundancy; RCO will report approximately half of the restoration metrics to PCSRF while the Tribe will report the remaining half. For example, while the total stream length treated (C.0.b) for the project is 0.77 miles, the PCSRF database for award NA16NMF4380335 reflects half of that number: 0.385 miles, rounded to the nearest hundredth of a mile: 0.39.

The Lower South Fork Grays Restoration Project includes actions that will alter physical habitat conditions to form a resilient, forested floodplain island network, increase side channel habitat, improve instream habitat diversity, increase wood loading, increase pool area and residual depth, and increase the quantity and quality of spawning habitat throughout the project reach. The project will also encourage sediment deposition and retention on site, alleviating pervasive sediment impacts to productive reaches lower in the Grays River watershed. We expect these changes to drive biological outcomes including increased spawning success and improved juvenile survival rates for listed salmon and steelhead populations.