DESCRIPTION
The Skagit Watershed Council's proposed Riparian Habitat Strategy seeks to collaborate with scientists, decision-makers, project sponsors, and landowners where appropriate to fulfill those functions in critical estuarine, floodplain, and tributary habitats (Tier 1 and 2) as outlined in the 2010 Strategic Approach. Components of the proposed project will include development of a shared geodatabase aligned with Skagit's Adaptive Management & Monitoring program, an assessment of current conditions and desired future conditions, and development of a riparian habitat strategy. Strategies will include accelerating degraded habitats towards later successional stages through planting and site maintenance as well as protecting high quality habitats through invasive species assessment and control.
The Skagit Watershed Council completed a comprehensive Riparian Habitat Assessment that supported collaboration between scientists, decision-makers and project sponsors to develop and use the most recent data products to answer critical questions for developing future projects and monitoring & adaptively managing our stewardship of riparian habitats in the Skagit Watershed. We completed a full inventory of riparian actions that have been completed in the last 20 years by our 7 major riparian project implementers. We utilized WDFW's High Resolution Change Detection database to quantify the loss of forest cover between 2006 and 2013. Together the gain in forest cover from riparian plantings and the loss in forest cover via anthropogenic actions yielded the conclusion that we are gaining significantly more forest cover in riparian and floodplain areas of interest to Chinook salmon in the Skagit than we are losing. We completed a comprehensive land cover classification for 2013 and canopy height models for 2006 and 2015 that described the quality and quantity of riparian conditions in approximately 40 reaches of the Skagit Watershed, with results presented on the WRIA and reach scales. Final products included a full report, an ArcGIS Online geodatabase, reach sheets online, all of which are available to the public on the SWC website. Additionally, we identified 14 future planting sites using the data produced by the report, with 5 of those sites having planting plans developed and submitted as attachments in PRISM. The report documents a framework for considering relative priorities for restoration and protection by reach, though SWC chose at this time to stop short of ranking reaches and creating prescriptive strategies. More work will be done on this topic in the near future.
