Regional Support Team for Biocultural Restoration of Riverscapes

Efforts

Efforts describe the work of workgroups

• Knowledge Creation
  • Adaptive Management
  • Arts and Crafts
  • Lessons
  • Monitoring
  • Research
• Protection
  • Acquisition
  • Green Infrastructure
  • Regulation
• Restoration
  • Beach Nourishment
  • Engineered Log Jams
  • Fish Passage
  • Revegetation
• Social Change
  • Advocacy
  • Coordination
  • Education
  • Funding
  • Integrated Ecosystem Management
  • Legislation
  • Planning

Effort References

• RCO's PRISM Project Search
• Salmon Recovery Portal
• Ecology's Administration of Grants and Loans
• USACE Regulatory In-lieu Fee and Bank information Tracking System

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This effort expands on initial work around Bio-Cultural Restoration Field Stations and the Skykomish Field Station with a coalition effort to expand the model to the Deschutes Watershed and explore new relationships in the Little Skookum Ecosystem and the Chimacum Creek Watershed. The proposal establishes regional technical and legal infrastructure to enable local Conservation District-led teams to develop ongoing community-led restoration efforts, in close collaboration Tribal Governments as we explore mechanisms for the sustained stewardship of Riparian Buffers.

2025 Application

Our regional partnership will expand a prototype biocultural riparian stewardship model to enable community-based riverscape restoration in four focus areas. We enable a network of well-trained site stewards leading voluntary site restoration efforts. We integrate restoration with workforce development, school programs, and community tending and gathering to make stewardship of resilient and biodiverse riverscapes a locus of community life.

Full Grant Application Text and Letters of Support

Summary Description

Our existing restoration efforts face many challenges to long-term riverscape resilience. A vehicle for increased private participation in riparian management is vital. This proposal develops a community-led stewardship model to augment our existing restoration industry. This initiative offers an innovative approach to adaptive and participatory reach-scale planning to support community-led restoration, monitoring, and adaptive management that aims to scale independently of agency staffing.

The riverscapes of lowland Puget Sound form a massive landbase of over a million acres. With our existing capacity it will take 100 years to apply a single vegetation treatment to 10% of these lands. We see a fundamental mismatch between the scale of need, and the capacity of our public industry. Private landowners don’t have the labor. We must realize a broad community-led movement capable of the stewardship of riverscapes.

Riverscapes have provided public goods and common pool resources for millenia–a riverscape commons. This commons already exists, but is not recognized or valued as it could be. Our public trust interests are represented by a bewildering mix of public ownership, deed restrictions, regulations, and incentives. Communities can invest in riparian areas and get a return in the form of ecosystem services, community identity, and household harvest. However we lack the deep cultural knowledge to do this work well.

Biocultural Restoration is “the science and practice of restoring not only ecosystems, but also human and cultural relationships to place, such that cultures are strengthened and revitalized alongside the lands with which they are inextricably linked” (State University of New York). We propose that our ability to do riverscape restoration, increase resilience, and adapt at scale will depend on a slow process of cultural transformation that restores direct relationships with land and revitalizes our culture. This strategy shifts on-the-ground riparian restoration from a capital project, to a community and cultural development activity.

This involves more than environmental education, but directly mobilizing and empowering community-based management. Through hosting volunteer-organized intensive field stations, our pilot efforts have efficiently mobilized skilled volunteer labor, with low agency staff involvement. We also provide workforce development experiences for students entering the restoration field. This initiative attracts repeat participants interested in developing a deeper relationship with riverscapes.

Using planning and design charrettes and community-led field stations we propose to expand and experiment with persistent restoration activity to protect and restore biodiversity at sites over time–a capability critically lacking in our industry.

This proposal expands on three years of development and two years of practice in the Skykomish valley on Tulalip Lands with NOAA funds. Under this award we will stabilize and build out the Skykomish model, moving towards complete reliance on a cohort of local private site stewards. We will replicate this tested model in South Puget Sound on an Incubator Site in the Lower Deschutes River in Thurston County. In addition we will host planning charrettes to define focus areas in the Chimacum Valley in Jefferson County and the Skookum Valley in Mason County. In each case, while we monitor, restore, and maintain acres, completing tasks and providing deliverables, our goal is to create the enabling conditions for culturally-motivated tending of riverscapes that creates household value, and can scale independently of agency staffing.

To support this expansion we will establish an interdisciplinary design team capable of integrating restoration, forestry, ethnobotany, agroforestry, and traditional practices required for long-term riverscape management in a modern regulatory and ownership regime.

Our consortium of regional and local partners will expand a regional model for biocultural restoration. This will include long-term management strategies, tools and capabilities that empower communities to tend their own riparian zone. This “slow restoration” approach will operate in close coordination with our existing crew-based “fast restoration” system, to:

1. Increase community value creation in riverscapes while protecting and restoring riparian biodiversity,
2. Use community labor and interest to augment government-funded crews,
3. Produce and harvest products in riverscapes that support and enhance restoration and household economies,
4. Increase tribal traditional gathering opportunities consistent with treaty rights and salmon recovery planning,
5. Attract disinterested landowners to attractive regenerative riverscape models, and
6. Build toward the “boots on the ground” necessary to implement real adaptation and resilience efforts at landscape scales under climate change.

facts or skills acquired by a person through experience or education.