Desolation Meadows Restoration Project: Reconnecting Floodplain Habitat for Mid-Columbia Steelhead

While the goal of this project was to produce complete designs for restoration, Trout Unlimited and project partners returned a large portion of this funding to OWEB due to challenges with partners including staff turnover, staff preferences, capacity, and forest priorities. With the support of OWEB and other leveraged funding, the Desolation Meadows Restoration Project team completed a variety of design and planning actions. The team built a solid foundation for the design by conducting an extensive historical and current background building exercise, conducting a ground based survey of the stream and channel, assessing the site and creating a restoration assessment, creating a design set that sits at approximately 60% design.

Desolation Creek is a major spawning location in the North Fork John Day River (NFJD) summer steelhead population area, with high intrinsic restoration potential and high protection benefit for recovery. Additionally, Desolation Creek is Core Habitat for ESA-listed Bull trout and provides key spawning and rearing habitat for Middle Columbia spring Chinook (Oregon State Sensitive Critical Species). While excellent habitat conditions exist in certain portions of the population area, numerous opportunities remain to protect/restore habitats proximate to existing stronghold core areas to improve habitat function, connectivity, and resilience. Although final designs were not completed for this project, 60% designs were produced and will lead to the future development of final designs for recovery actions: Restore natural functions and processes through actions identified under the following strategies (1) protect and conserve natural ecological processes that support the viability of populations and their primary life history strategies throughout their life cycle (2) maintain and restore floodplain connectivity and function (3) restore degraded and maintain properly functioning channel structure and complexity (4) restore riparian condition and LWD recruitment and maintain properly functioning conditions (5) restore degraded and maintain properly functioning upland processes to minimize unnatural rates of erosion and runoff.