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respaosibility to make drastic changes in their land use practices wliich directly affect over fifty percent of the Basin's 

 remaining fish habitat. Drastic action is required to stop logging-related sedimentation and loss of large woody debris 

 diat has caused an average 60 peicoit loss of large pools cm streams in national forests over the past fifty years. 

 Likewise, decisive grazing reforms are critical — particularly in areas such as the Snake River Basin, where analysts 

 believe grazing practices are the single greatest source of habitat degradation. 



THE FAILURE OF TRADITIONAL WATERSHED RESTORATION APPROACHES 



A recent American Fisheries Society report found that 'In the past 10 years, many millions of dollars have beoi spent on 

 stream habitat managonent in Western North America. We find Ultle documented evidence of increased abundance of 

 safanonids associated with these massive expenditures.' 



Traditional approaches to stream habitat and ecosystem restoration can be characterized as 'band-aid' approaches that 

 have several distinguishing features. First, the identification and diagnosis of habitat problems tends to be focused on 

 finding patches of habitat that are amenable to predetermined, generic techniques. For example, many past and curroit 

 programs rely heavily on inslallabon of log weirs to c<xistruct pools in streams. Planning for these projects generally 

 focuses on idoitifying reaches of stream that do not meet water temperature standards or with gradient and bank 

 structure suited fbyacaUy to the installation of such devices, and diat happen to be accessible to the heavy equipment 

 needed to do the work. There is little consideration whether the fish ccanmunity, or die watershed as a whole, are suited 

 to the kinds of changes of habitat these structures are intended to induce. It is commooly assimifid that aU fish benefit 

 equally from the plunge pool sequences created by such devices, and that the construction of weir pools will compensate 

 for all of the diverse changes in the ecosystem caused by human disturbance. 



Some evaluations of these projects indicate serious shortccnnings. For example, where log weirs and other artificial 

 structures achieve their physical objectives, their effects on native fish can be insignificant, or even negative. In other 

 cases, they may stay in place, but have unintended and damaging physical side effects, such as severe bank erosion or 

 blockages to juvenile fish migration. Finally, in many cases, such structures suffer a high incidence of outright {diysical 

 failure. The results of numerous studies suggest that the effects of such profects are inconsistent and difficult to predict. 

 Conditions in the watershed as a whole appear to be more important than structure design in determining whether 

 structures will function or fail. Faihire rates are especially high in severely damaged watersheds or stream reaches 

 where disturbances are cngoing. Furthermore, in some watersheds fish populations are so widely depleted by extensive 

 habitat degradation and other factors that few or no fish are available to colonize artificially created habitats. Finally, 

 the vast majority of streams are not accessible to heavy equijHnent or are otherwise unsuited to structural modification. 

 Put simply, traditional techniques fail to address the root biological and physical causes of habitat deterioraticai and 

 population decline, and often aggravate, compUcate, or add to existing problems. 



Priorities for traditional 'band-aid' restoration approaches are typically determined by identifying the worst-degraded or 

 ugliest-looking sites, and spending all available resources treating tiiese areas widi genenc and largely cosmetic structural 

 techniques to 'bring them iq> to standards.' Once the desired improvements have beea made, further habitat-disturbing 

 activities in the waterdied can be allowed to proceed. 



The result of the "band-aid' strategy is predictable: disturbances are maximally dispersed across the landscape, and 

 virtually all sites across the landscape are homogeneously degraded. The worst sites may be partially "fixed, ' but 

 meanwhile disturbance-soisitive species have likely been lost through the eatae stream system. As road networks and 

 logging units are diqjersed across the hatdscape, virtually every tributary and stream reach beccnnes vulnerable to 

 management- accelerated disturbance from sedimenlatirai and other effects when the next large storm strikes. Because no 

 effort is made to identify and protect key watershed refugia, the most productive and diverse habitats are subject to 

 continued disturbance, v^iile the most severely degraded areas (inherently the least amenable to structural improvement, 

 and therefore the most likely sites of project failure) receive all the restoration resources. In other words, this strategy is 

 a recipe for the degradation of the remaining healthier watersheds and other kinds of secure ecological refugia— leading 

 predictably to the cumulative extirpation of formerly abundant, but sensitive species over large areas. 



Past and present aj^noaches to the management of watersheds and riverine-riparian have not only allowed the present 

 crisis to develop, they have indeed exacerbated it For example, the intense fidieries goierated during periods when 

 hatchery stocks are productive have often driven wild stocks into decline and local extinction. Perhaps worse, reliance 

 on increasingly costly, heavily subsidized artificial producti<m of hatchery salmon has facibtated the decbne of natural 



