Early this June, 73 square miles of land along the lower Klamath River were placed under the ownership and management of the Yurok Tribe, in the largest “land back” deal in California history. Two decades in the making, the deal is the latest step in a broader movement to restore tribal sovereignty along the banks of the Klamath River.
Today, the Klamath River flows freely from Lake Ewauna to the Pacific Ocean. This is no small feat. Until last fall, four hydroelectric dams obstructed the river’s natural course. For over a century, the dams had degraded local ecosystems, decimating salmon and steelhead trout populations essential to indigenous foodways and choking the river with toxic algal blooms. After decades of advocacy from Klamath River Basin tribes and environmental groups, the dams have been demolished in what marks one of the most ambitious river restoration efforts in U.S. history.
The true work however, extends beyond the moment of demolition. Under tribal stewardship, ecologists like Joshua Chenoweth, the Yurok Tribe’s senior riparian ecologist is working on large-scale restoration efforts—a process that will take decades—in order to ensure the ecological health of the region’s future. Chenoweth, who is leading revegetation efforts in the reservoir footprints, spent five years mapping the area’s vegetation and creating a plan that would slow sediment drawdown and foster a thriving, self-sustaining ecosystem. The resulting efforts required a multi-pronged process that included the saving of native seeds and the thorough seeding of the land by hand and by helicopter.
In the months since the final remnants of the dams were removed last fall, the river has seen hundreds of thousands of native plants take root as well as a hopeful uptick in salmon populations. Nearly two years after the demolition of the Copco 2 dam, we check in with the ecologists on the ground who are leading restoration efforts.
Isabel Ling:
What is a riparian ecologist?
Joshua Chenoweth:
I guess my title is a little bit of a misnomer. I consider myself a restoration ecologist more so than just the specifically riparian restoration ecologist. My role on this project was to prepare for dam removal and get the project ready. There’s a couple pieces to that. Essentially, there’s three parts prior to actually implementing revegetation. That includes conducting reference plots, kind of learning about the ecosystem, right? And using that information to create success criteria, but also to kind of direct the species you might want to grow and be introduced into the new landscape.
The second piece is seed collection. So, you get that information, then you collect seed, and you take that seed and either propagate it in seed increase fields, so that you have the proper volume for seeding the landscape. But we also take some of that seed and, you know, propagate them into trees or shrubs, right? So different ways that we use the seed. Then, the third piece is invasive species, so monitoring, deciding which ones to manage and how to manage them, and trying to create an environment that is protected to some degree from an invasive species invasion.
IL:
I read that you spent five years mapping the vegetation in the area in preparation for the un-damming. You work at a scale some people might have difficulty wrapping their heads around. To provide some context, could you explain how much land and how many plants you’re working with?
JC:
Sure, so when the dams were removed, they exposed a little over 2000 acres [of land]. Some of that acreage is the river itself. So that doesn’t get re-vegetated, some of it’s maybe a steep slope. So about the actual acres that require some kind of re-vegetation is closer to 1800 acres. 1800 acres is big.
It’s not as big as a wildfire, right? You know, some wildfires are in the tens of thousands of acres or more, but most of the time, wildfires aren’t necessarily re-vegetated. They tend to allow them to regenerate on their own.
This project required 90% to be revegetated. And I say 90% because we made a choice to leave 10% untreated so we could learn and see the effect of our re vegetation. So when you think about 1600 acres that have to be re-vegetated, then you have to think about how much material that requires. And so if you’re seeding— I don’t like to talk about weight, but it’s really the only way to communicate scale, right? And the reason I don’t like to talk about weight is because it does matter what species you’re you’re selecting. And really care about is the number of seeds per square foot that we’re trying to reintroduce, yeah, and so you might hear me talk about pure live seed, PLS. That’s the term we use to describe the amount of viable seed we’re trying to introduce per square foot in the landscape. So our target was between 80 and 100 pure live seeds per square foot for our hand seeding operations. If we were to hand sow the entire landscape, that was going to require about 18 billion seeds. There’s your scale, and depending on your weight, let’s say it’s 20 pounds an acre. We had produced these seeds through this program of five years of collecting and propagating in commercial facilities. You know, the seed that we got from the Klamath, as well as some commercial purchases where we didn’t collect this initial seed, but that was sourced somewhat close by commercial operators. We produced about 87,000 pounds of seed prior to the dam removal. So that was kind of the program’s final, you know, customized grow numbers. The res team purchased an additional tens of thousands of pounds for planting as well.
I don’t know what the total number is, but up to 60 to 80,000 pounds more on top of that, in order to do some helicopter seeding, because when you seed from a helicopter, you have to seed at a much higher rate than if you hand seed.
IL:
For this plan, you broke the land you were tasked with re-vegetating into parcels and then created specific seed mixes for each parcel based on their plant communities. Could you explain what a plant community is?
JC:
A plant community is the species that are kind of specifically associated with that place. In the Iron Gate area, for instance you would be in an oak woodland area. You’re probably going to be on a north-facing or east-facing slope, and oaks are going to be somewhat predominant. And the understory species, the ones that you would actually seed, are going to have a certain component to them, right? There’s certain species that are going to be present. Each different habitat type consists of different species types. So there might be a species in an oak woodland that’s also in a grassland and might also be found in the riparian area, for instance. But the reason we ended up making very community-oriented seed mixes is because we did have seed that some of our seed, we didn’t have lots of and we knew that it was found predominantly in one habitat type and not another. And so that allowed me to kind of take the various seed I had and disperse them suitably so that they were going to be more likely to thrive.
Now, one thing I like to say about dam removal, is you never know what’s going to work, because you have a whole new environment. The old soils are gone. They’re very by that instead of accumulated in the lake, and things could behave very differently, but at least if you know, ‘Hey, this guy tends to like the full sun on south-facing slopes, and you don’t see it on north -facing slopes.’ Well, I’m only going to put it there, right?
IL:
So I’m curious, what do you have in store for year two?
JC:
So this year we did some sediment modification. One of the things we saw was that there’s so much clay in the sediment, especially from Copco. So when it dried in the summer, that sediment shrank and created these cracks, making these columns. And so the cracks between the columns, in some places were very wide and deep. So where the cracks were, like in Iron Gate there were a lot of surfaces that didn’t take helicopter seed because it was so dry and harsh, res went in and did seed bed preparations.
A lot of the stuff is happier this year than last year. Success appears to be ahead in year two. If we continue to have a good water year, I expect a really good response again.
IL:
The Yurok tribe has really spearheaded the ecological stewardship of the Klamath River, alongside other tribes. How have you and your team as ecologists integrated indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and methods into your approach to restoration?
JC:
Well, one philosophy that’s important to me and to the Yurok, and typically to other tribal entities, is having a minimum tool approach. You don’t want to get in there with heavy equipment unless you really have to. So that’s a philosophy—to use people instead of machines. That’s kind of a basic idea that isn’t necessarily spoken out loud all the time or written down, but it’s definitely a philosophy like there was a lot of back and forth about how much, you know, how much disturbance to do. The Yurok tribe has a construction corporation, so they certainly use heavy equipment. But they like to do things as naturally as possible.
So that’s one approach. As far as the traditional ecological aspect that’s a piece that we’re slowly trying to integrate into the veg side. Things are moving fast, so we haven’t really had an opportunity other than trying to collect species that we know are important and introducing them into the landscape. And we did that. We definitely collected, you know, we spent a fair amount of money just collecting stuff that couldn’t get either as a plant or into seed increased fields, but we just kept stashing it over the years and then put it in our seed mix. And that was because of their cultural importance as well as their ecological importance—they always go hand in hand.
