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Monitoring the Qwuloolt Estuarine Levee Breach Restoration
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Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) Fish Ecology FE - Watershed
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Information
Project
Qwuloolt levee breach
Title
Monitoring the Qwuloolt Estuarine Levee Breach Restoration
Description
Comprehensive planning and monitoring of abiotic (hydrology, land forms, energy and nutrients, and chemistry) and biotic (plants, fish, invertebrates, birds, mammals) attributes pre- and post-breach at a 150 hectare site in the Snohomish estuary.
Data Sets
#CARD_INITIALS#
Qwuloolt biota
Species composition of plants, fallout insects, benthic invertebrates, birds, and fishes at Qwuloolt and adjacent reference sites
Fish Ecology - Watershed
#CARD_INITIALS#
Qwuloolt elevation
RTK GPS point locations at project and reference sites.
Fish Ecology - Watershed
#CARD_INITIALS#
Qwuloolt hydrology
Water level, temperature, and salinity at project and reference sites
Fish Ecology - Watershed
#CARD_INITIALS#
Snohomish estuary LiDAR and RGB orthophotos
LiDAR and orthophotos from 2009 across whole Snohomish River estuary
Fish Ecology - Watershed
Research Themes
Habitats to support sustainable fisheries and recovered populations
Healthy oceans, coastal waters, and riverine habitats provide the foundation for aquatic resources used by a diversity of species and society. Protecting marine, estuarine and freshwater ecosystems that support these species relies on science to link habitat condition/processes and the biological effects of restoration actions. The NWFSC provides the habitat science behind many management actions taken by NOAA Fisheries and other natural resource agencies to protect and recover aquatic ecosystems and living marine resources. The NWFSC also maintains a longstanding focus on toxic chemical contaminants, as a foundation for regional and national research on pollution threats to fisheries and protected resources.
Research Foci
Develop effective and efficient habitat restoration and conservation techniques
Maintaining and re-establishing viability and sustainability of living marine resources requires conservation and rehabilitation or restoration of habitats upon which species depend. Common habitat restoration approaches and tech-niques often presume that habitats are static features of the environment, and that creation of stable habitats is a desirable restoration strategy. However, riverine, nearshore, and marine habitats are created and sustained by dynamic landscape, climatic, and oceanographic processes and biota are adapted to changing habitats that are within the range of natural variability. Hence, current restoration strategies often have limited success, in part because they fail to recognize larger scale processes that drive habitat change, and in part because they fail to recognize intrinsic habitat potential of individual restoration sites. The main goals of this research focus are to: improve understanding of how large-scale processes create diverse and dynamic habitats that support marine and anadromous species, better understand how human activities alter habitat-forming processes and habitats, develop new restoration techniques that are compatible with sustainable habitat-forming processes, and understand the variety of actions needed to adequately conserve intact critical habitats. In addition, NWFSC’s research will improve understanding of how new and existing habitat restoration and protection techniques affect fish and habitat at multiple scales (i.e., reach, watershed, Evolutionarily Significant Unit).
Keywords
Puget Sound
Puget Sound
birds
all bird taxa
estuary
environment
juvenile salmonid
early life stages of salmonids
restoration
habitat restoration
wetland
type of habitat
Products
None associated
Taxa
Class Aves
birds
Class Mammalia
mammals
Kingdom Plantae
plants
Order Clupeiformes
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Order Osmeriformes
smelts
Order Salmoniformes
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People
Joshua Chamberlin
Principal Investigator