Project 1992-010-00:Fort Hall Habitat Restoration, Contract 77111 REL 30:1992-010-00 EXP FORT HALL HABITAT RESTORATION

Project 1992-010-00:

https://www.cbfish.org/Project.mvc/Display/1992-010-00



The Fort Hall Indian Reservation is located in southeastern Idaho, near Pocatello, and covers roughly 544,000 acres. Reservation surface-water resources are two large, mountainous watersheds drained by the Blackfoot and Portneuf rivers which eventually flow through the Snake River plain and enter its channel at river miles 750 and 726. Ferry Butte, at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Snake, is the northern boundary of an undeveloped 29,000 acre prairie draining numerous springs known as the Fort Hall Bottoms. These spring streams flow southwesterly into the lower channel of the Portneuf River, where 27,000 acres of the Bottoms have been flooded by American Falls Reservoir. The primary goal of the project is to restore fluvial salmonid habitat that has been degraded by past anthropogenic uses, primarily agriculture, irrigation, livestock grazing, and impounded and regulated river flows.



In March 1992, the Resident Fisheries Program, by cost-sharing Bonneville Power Administration and Bureau of Indian Affairs projects, began a comprehensive program combining instream structures, riparian fencing, and riparian planting-designed to narrow and deepen stream channels, clear spawning gravels, raise water tables, stabilize banks, aggrade silt, provide cover, and reduce summer water temperatures.

In other studies instream structures have increased pools, usable spawning gravel, and undercut banks in an Oregon stream (House and Boehne 1986) and salmonid biomass in two Arizona streams (Rinne 1981). Numerous examples with beneficial results have been shown using structures in Danish watercourses to restore meanders, banks, riffles, spawning gravels, deep pools, water quality, and fish passage (Madsen 1995). Stream bank revegetation combined with fencing to exclude livestock has had widespread success in improving riparian vegetation, bank stability, water quality, stream morphology



Contract 77111 REL 30:

https://www.cbfish.org/Contract.mvc/Summary/77111