TFT’s patented toolkit assesses watersheds, prioritizes restoration actions, manages watershed program implementation, and monitors progress over time.

The StreamBank® toolkit is comprised of three elements:

• BasinScout®: Integrated diagnostics that assess large landscapes and watersheds to estimate environmental uplift and prioritize restoration sites.
• StreamBank Administrative Toolkit: A program management tool that allows for efficient implementation and tracking of large-scale watershed programs.
• StreamBank Monitoring Applications: A field data collection app for long-term analysis and reporting.

Sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus from runoff impede the quality of rivers across the country. The simplification of landscapes and removal of streamside vegetation has left habitat inhospitable for native species. Overuse has led to once-plentiful streams disappearing. Wildlife, communities, and economies have suffered as a consequence.

With this toolkit, we’re able to plan, implement, and monitor robust restoration and conservation programs that match the pace and scale of problems and offer stakeholders an efficient and holistic way of mitigating impacts and better managing resources.

How it Works

BasinScout

Thanks to improvements in remote sensing and satellite imagery, we now have the resolution we need to see an entire watershed.

Our BasinScout methodology combines this imagery with publicly available data sets to identify project sites with the greatest “uplift” potential. 

This term “uplift” describes a site’s potential environmental benefit based on pre-project and post-project conditions. More simply, it’s the amount of environmental good that can be done in a single place.

For example, with information on existing streamside vegetation and solar radiation, BasinScout can identify the best places to plant trees to generate shade to improve water quality and deliver more uplift.

Water Quality Assessments

Publicly available data on soil type, slope, and crops grown are inputs we use to assess where to implement agricultural best management practices as a means to assess water quality. For instance, actions such as installing fences to keep livestock out of a river, upgrading irrigation systems, or planting cover crops on select parcels of land can reduce agricultural runoff, keeping fertilizers and manure out of the stream. These added nutrients otherwise lead to algal blooms and hypoxic zones (areas absent of oxygen). Using the BasinScout methodology, we can identify the largest potential sources of runoff in a watershed and help to direct the actions where they are most needed to address the impacts.

Factors that Go Into Assessments

Understanding that nature and watersheds are complex, these assessments take a number of elements into consideration:

• Ecological limiting factors: What are the environmental needs within the watershed?
• Regulatory review: What are the regulatory requirements and policies for the watershed?
• Disturbance: What is the current state of health across the watershed? What are the current practices that are impacting water quality or quantity?
• Change: What restoration or conservation has already occurred and what change in ecological health can be tracked?
• Goals and requirements: What are the water quality and quantity improvement targets for the watershed? What will it take to get there?

Building the Plan

BasinScout

Once we understand the lay of the land, additional features in BasinScout can be used to identify and prioritize potential project sites for conservation actions based on environmental goals, recruitment, and cost constraints.

If you think of the first layer of BasinScout as a map laying out all the restoration or conservation opportunities in a watershed, then additional layers take the prioritization process a step further. Based upon goals, costs and timeline, the tool identifies the sites where action would make the most sense under a given set of real-world conditions.

BasinScout can help build a scientifically defensible conservation plan through processes such as:

• Prioritizing criteria and weighting: What criteria will be used to determine priority sites and most effective conservation actions?
• Determining feasibility: What are the political, data, time, and cost requirements that affect optimization?
• Maximizing outcomes: What are the priority sites that meet environmental goals while staying within financial and recruitment constraints?

Our Work in the Rogue River Basin

We’ve worked with the City of Medford and City of Ashland to offset the temperature impacts of the millions of gallons of warm water discharged into the Rogue River by wastewater treatment plants. Actions to offset the warm water discharge have included working with key landowners to plant trees and generate shade to lower water temperatures.

The amount of sun blocked by tree canopy is translated into thermal credits and tracked in kilocalories. A kilocalorie represents the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a liter of water by 1.0 degree Celsius. One credit equals one kilocalorie per day, and TFT was tasked with generating 600 million through restoration.

To ensure we could meet the restoration goal, we used certain features of BasinScout to evaluate the shade benefit and cost of implementation for each potential site. We then played out different scenarios, discerning the best sites to plant to meet the kilocalorie obligation efficiently and cost-effectively.

Our Work in the Snake River Basin

We’re working with Idaho Power Company (IPC) to mitigate the thermal impacts of their Hells Canyon Dam Complex. Planting native vegetation along key tributaries to the Snake River, collaborating with irrigators to reduce agricultural runoff, and enhancing floodplains and wetlands along the river bank and existing islands are all part of the proposed stewardship plan for the Snake River watershed. These plans were prioritized thanks to certain features of BasinScout for evaluating water quality factors and the cost of implementation for each potential site.

Ensuring Results: StreamBank Monitoring App

We don’t want to go forward with a restoration or conservation project hoping it will have a benefit. We want to know it is having a benefit.

TFT recognized that one of the biggest obstacles to conservation was gathering data and reviewing it to get actionable insights. This inspired us to build a better solution and develop a 21st-century way to collect imperative data from the field for long-term analysis and reporting.

With the tablet-optimized StreamBank monitoring app, we can record vegetation, stream features, and other data at the project site and then upload it to a central database. No transcription is required. By retiring our field notebooks, we’ve eliminated the intermediate step of data entry and added validation rules, improving the quality of the data we collect. Regular monitoring allows us to ensure that project site goals are met, and we can compare site status to performance objectives year after year.

Our Work in the Sandy River Basin

In the Sandy River Basin, where we’ve implemented restoration projects for more than a decade, we’ve compiled a collection of data documenting exactly how the reintroduction of large wood, side channels, and native vegetation has improved native fish habitat.

In 2016, the Salmon River, a tributary of the Sandy, broke a record for the greatest number of steelhead spawners, (68 redds per mile), on a two-mile restoration reach. For the fourth consecutive year, the number of winter steelhead spawning in the upper Sandy basin was more than 350% of that when they were listed as a threatened species in 1998. Spring Chinook counts were also up, at 40 redds per mile. That’s more than 200% the long-term average.

Together, these tools are integral to carrying out our mission – ensuring investments and actions are strategic and effective, leading us to a future with clean, healthy freshwater on a timeline that matters to us all.