Middle Fork Willamette 8.6 Restoration

This area is home to an abundance of wildlife, including Olive-sided flycatcher, Great Blue Heron, other breeding songbirds, beaver, Chinook salmon, winter steelhead, and Oregon chub. 

Trees planted here include big leaf maple, black cottonwood, red alder, cedar, Pacific crabapple, willow, and others. Shrubs planted here include red and blue elderberry, Oregon grape, redosier dogwood, Douglas spirea, red flowering currant, and oceanspray. 

Native trees provide shade, while native shrubs protect the landscape from invasion by non-native plants and provide flowers for pollinators and berries that become food for wildlife. Certain species thrive by the water’s edge, while others are more drought-resistant and thrive in the upland. All these plants help to develop a dense, healthy, multi-story riparian forest.

This site will be maintained for 20 years by The Freshwater Trust and the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed Council through the Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission’s Water Quality Trading Program, which requires projects to meet defined performance standards. Stewardship includes reducing invasive weeds such as reed canary grass, Himalayan blackberry, English ivy, Canada thistle, and poison hemlock from overtaking the project area.

The Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission of Eugene-Springfield (MWMC) and The Freshwater Trust are partnering to use shade produced from restoring streamside forests to help the utility meet its water quality goals. As the plants grow at each restored site, they block solar load (heat from the sun), which generates “shade (thermal) credits.” These “credits” benefit the MWMC and fish because the MWMC registers them with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to comply with a wastewater permit to protect water quality under the federal Clean Water Act, while fish get the benefit of cooler water in the streams.

The Freshwater Trust selects sites using its StreamBank® BasinScout® tool, which prioritizes many potential sites based on different environmental benefits. Sites throughout the Upper Willamette basin are modeled to quantify the amount of thermal benefit (shade) possible under restored conditions. This allows the team to locate the most high-impact planting sites and work with willing landowners to restore them.

The Freshwater Trust closely monitors this restoration project to ensure that it is on track to meet performance standards and to identify stewardship needs. Additionally, sites in the water quality trading program have independent third-party verifiers that confirm that the site is meeting its performance targets and generating the environmental benefits needed to comply with the wastewater permit requirements.

In addition to The Freshwater Trust and the MWMC, partners also include the Oregon Parks & Recreation Department and the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed Council, the local project manager and lead restoration practitioner.