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NOAA Grant Helps Ensures Vital Fish Habitat Within Sacramento River System

The Nature Conservancy Leads Effort to Restore Important Section of Sacramento River National Wildlife Refuge

San Francisco,  Calif. — July 22, 2004 — The Nature Conservancy today announced a grant of $25,000 from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to aid in restoring an important section of the Sacramento River floodplain in Northern California. The award will be made through the national partnership between NOAA’s Community-based Restoration Program and The Nature Conservancy’s Marine Initiative. Successful restoration of the area is critical to the survival of anadromous fish — ocean-dwelling fish that return to fresh water to spawn — such as Chinook salmon.

The project is expected to increase spawning gravel to the channel in the area, an important factor in anadromous fish habitat restoration.  Restoration will benefit species of special concern such as Winter-run Chinook salmon, Spring-run Chinook and Sacramento splittail.

The project calls, in part, for local farmers and volunteer schoolchildren to plant a variety of native plant communities on a 206-acre section of the Sacramento River National Wildlife Refuge in Tehama County, approximately five miles south of Red Bluff.  Restoration of the section will nearly complete a contiguous block of native, unleveed Sacramento River floodplain habitat totaling 2,818 acres, or nearly four and a half square miles.

“The Nature Conservancy’s Sacramento River Project is among the most ambitious habitat restoration projects in the western United States,” said Dawit Zeleke, director for The Nature Conservancy’s Sacramento River project.  “The Conservancy and its partners will restore more than 50 square miles of native habitat in a river corridor well over 100 miles in length.  Since the late 1980s, bit by bit, we have been putting the pieces of this complex living system back into place.”

It is expected that the streamside habitat can be restored to self-sustaining status within one to four years of the original restoration planting and to self-regenerating status within ten years. Restoration of the Sacramento River improves water quality and injects money into the local farm economy.

During the past two centuries human demands on the Sacramento River and the surrounding land have destroyed natural habitat on a massive scale, causing steep declines in the populations of birds, fish, and many other species. By the end of the 1980s, only 10 percent of what were formerly extensive streamside forests remained along the Sacramento.  Restoring streamside areas is a critical step toward providing native fish, birds, and mammals with the habitat they need to survive.