Abstract

Riparian Restoration Prioritization on the Shasta River
Track: Parks, Natural Reserves, Fisheries, and Wildlife Management
Authors: Daryl Van Dyke

The Partners for Fish & Wildlife Program of the USFWS uses riparian planting of willow trees as one strategy to improve riparian conditions, restore geomorphological complexity, and reduce stream insolation.
Survivorship of planted trees has been inconsistently observed by restoration practitioners on the Shasta River. The Klamath Strategic Habitat Conservation Team developed mapping products that would improve the survivorship rate of riparian plantings. A conceptual model and analytic approach that identified distance to a low-flow hyporheic zone, solar exposure, and an inventory of existing vegetation was used to prioritize.
An existing LiDAR data set was used to produce vegetation inventories, detrended surface models for the analysis, and compose a raster-based approach to site prioritization.
Intermediate derived products identified remnant oxbows and other geomorphological features. KSHC is collaborating with Riparian Working Group partners from The Nature Conservancy to calibrate the survivorship model.