Monitoring

Evaluating progress in watershed restoration

Get involved with our monitoring effort by joining us for Stream Sampling on Whychus Creek. You can volunteer for one or both days! Learn more about this community science event here.

Long-term watershed monitoring is critical to our restoration programs because it provides an understanding of restoration needs, trends, and the effectiveness of restoration projects.  Over time, this information is important for guiding our strategic priorities, reporting on successes and failures, and tracking changes on the landscape that affect the health of local rivers.

For the past decade, we have worked closely with a network of technical advisors to implement monitoring projects focused on specific areas where key questions need to be answered.

Monitoring projects are designed around key indicators of watershed health, such as water quality (e.g., temperature, pH, etc.), stream flow, fish passage, fish habitat, and aquatic insects (macroinvertebrates).

Over the last decade, UDWC has worked with restoration practitioners to design more effective stream restoration projects that create more abundant and higher quality habitat for fish and wildlife. Alongside this effort we are working with practitioners and technical experts to tailor our monitoring to provide the most useful information about the habitat and ecosystem conditions resulting from our stream restoration projects.

Overall, we use monitoring to:

  • Analyze the status of local rivers and streams;
  • Track changes over time;
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of restoration projects;
  • Identify emerging issues that may affect local fish and wildlife; and
  • Inform the community about important issues.

Our work in the Middle Deschutes River and Tumalo Creek is focused on understanding how summer streamflow restoration improves water quality and the health of resident fish populations.

Monitoring in Whychus Creek allows UDWC to evaluate the effects of restoration by tracking long-term changes in physical and biological indicators such as temperature, macroinvertebrates, and measure of fish habitat quantity and quality.

Water quality monitoring over the past decade has helped us develop a robust understanding of how our streams are functioning and what restoration needs exist.