Hare Creek Mainstem Instream Habitat Enhancement Project

The purpose of the Project is to enhance instream rearing habitats for Coho Salmon and steelhead trout. The Project is necessary due to decades of forest legacy impacts that left riparian stands ill-equipped for natural instream wood recruitment as well as considerable stream clearing efforts in the 1960s-1980s that left the watershed lacking adequate habitat complexity and geomorphic function. Adding complex large wood features improves geomorphic function by capturing spawning gravels, improving winter and summer instream refugia, backflooding off-channel habitat and improving access to floodplains.

The specific objective of the Project is to construct approximately 97 instream features within a 15,500 foot (2.9-mile) section of Hare Creek, consisting of 185 pieces of large wood.

The goal of the Project is to improve the quality and quantity of spawning and rearing habitat for Coho Salmon in Hare Creek by installing large wood features. The addition of these large wood structures will increase stream habitat complexity, pool frequency, pool depth, high-flow refugia, and over-summer rearing habitat for Coho Salmon and steelhead trout.