LCREP Update

Welcome……..To the Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership E-Update - a summary of some of the current activities of the staff, committees and Board.



REI Funds Estuary Partnership for Seventh Year!

At our May 7 Board meeting, Holly Van Fleet, our Board member from REI presented us with a check for support of our Outdoor Service Learning Program. We are grateful that REI, a loyal and generous grantor, has chosen to support us again this year! We are humbled to receive such long standing support from REI. Their partnership extends well beyond their funds – they have helped us deliver many stewardship program and helped us train volunteers for our water quality monitoring event. Thank you REI.



Oregon Community Foundation Supports Estuary Partnership Outdoor Learning!

The Oregon Community Foundation is providing $10,000 to help expand our existing outdoor environmental education program to include six Oregon communities in the lower river area. The Estuary Partnership is honored to partner with OCF. Their commitment to children and the outdoors sets an example for all of us.



Opening at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge – Join us Saturday, June 14 at 1:00, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Columbia Gorge Refuge Stewards will host the opening of the Gibbons Creek Wildlife Trail at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The Refuge is located on State Route 14 outside Washougal, WA. Josh Holcomb and Annie Kleffner of our Stewardship Team will be on site that day to help out. The Estuary Partnership and the Columbia Gorge Refuge Stewards have partnered on a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant to involve youth, teachers, and parent volunteers in a project educating participants on the importance of the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge and building personal stewardship for the Refuge’s protection. Since January of 2009, the Estuary Partnership led a total of fourteen workdays at the Refuge; eight Saturday volunteer plantings and six service learning filed trips with eleven classes of students. The numbers are impressive: 1328 volunteer hours on the Refuge and 1476 native trees and shrubs planted. We’re not done yet! Watch our website at www.lcrep.org for plantings at Steigerwald in Fall of 2009. Visit the Fish and Wildlife Service website at www.fws.gov/ridgefieldrefuges/steigerwaldlake/recreation.html for details on the June 14th opening.



Big Canoes Back in the Water

Wet skies in April didn’t keep the Estuary Partnership’s Stewardship Team from kicking off the 2009 Big Canoe season. We have already had 27 classes with 698 students and 85 adults participate in our on-river program. Big Canoe trips have taken place on Lake River in Ridgefield, along the Multnomah Channel near Sauvie Island, and at Coffinbury Lake at Fort Stevens State Park along the Oregon Coast. School trips will continue in May and June before a busy summer season begins. Thanks to Gail Alexander with Ridgefield Kayak Rental for helping with Big Canoe storage!



Habitat Restoration Prioritization Framework used in Ranking Project Applications

The Estuary Partnership used our prioritization framework for the first time this past month as additional information to our existing evaluation criteria to evaluate and rank habitat restoration projects for funding. This prioritization offers a tiered approach to prioritizing restoration—the first tier assesses disturbance at the project site scale and surrounding areas providing a ranking of individual areas of high, medium or low disturbances. This then allows the Estuary Partnership to determine the type of project suitable for the area: protection, enhancement, or restoration, and whether the technique used will be likely to succeed based upon surrounding landscape land uses. The second tier allows a comparison of the potential benefits, effectiveness, and likelihood of success across specific restoration projects. The Estuary Partnership developed this with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Estuary Partnership staff will work with PNNL in the upcoming year to incorporate new datasets and concepts to refine the framework. The framework was developed over the past couple of years with funds from EPA and BPA.



Two Events: River Event and our Annual Dinner

We are planning two fun and new events this year! By popular request, we are back on the river for fun ‘family’ event – for kids of all ages. On Sunday, August 9 from noon to 4 pm, we will host a festival at Frenchman’s Bar Park in Vancouver. The big event will be team races in our 34’ canoes! We’ll also have fun events and plenty of good food!

Saturday, November 14 from 6 pm to 10 pm we will host our annual dinner at the Portland Art Museum. This year we will celebrate with a show of art and artists of the lower Columbia River, a special art show featuring art work from the students in our programs and as always, yummy food from the Vibrant Table, a performance by some of our students and just a fun time.



Dirt to Turn at the Humboldt Learning Garden

Within the next few weeks contractors will begin to transform a vacant, weed filled lot adjacent to Humboldt School in Portland into the Humboldt Learning Garden. The Humboldt Learning Garden is the latest of the Estuary Partnership’s Schoolyard Stormwater projects and the biggest to date. Phase 1 work will begin in the next few weeks and will include clearing and grading the site, constructing a plaza that will serve as a student classroom, creating a network of gravel paths, and installation of a new fence and entries. Phase 2, scheduled for later this year, will include installation of a cistern to capture stormwater runoff from the school roof and the plumbing necessary to irrigate the garden. Project partners include Oregon Solutions, Humboldt School and the Portland School District, Bureau of Environmental Services, the Housing Authority of Portland, and Greenworks PC.



Stewardship Update

The Spring planting season is over for this year! Our Stewardship Team led weekend volunteer plantings and student service learning plantings at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Our weekend planting events draw volunteers from Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church groups, civic organizations, corporations and members of the general public. Students and teachers from public and private schools in both Washington and Oregon participated in our student service learning projects. By getting involved with the plantings, these volunteers helped the Estuary Partnership and the wildlife refuges restore damaged habitat. We thank each and every volunteer for their time and amazing effort! We hope to see you again during the Fall planting season.



Habitat Forum Regional Needs

On May 1, 75 policy makers and habitat restoration practitioners joined us to set a course for habitat restoration in the next decade. We took a quick look at what has happened since 1999:

§ 123 projects including 13,054 acres have been completed by the major entities

§ More coordination, notably by the Estuary Partnership Science Work Group

§ A significant investment money

§ new information and data, such as our shoreline inventory, landscape classification, a prioritization- GIS based framework to help target habitat types and functions for restoration and regional criteria for restoration.

We looked at what we have learned. The accessible, ready to go projects have pretty much been exhausted. To go to the next level, we heard that:

§ Restoration and conservation need to fit into community needs – not their needs into ‘ours’

§ Developing projects takes more access to technical expertise

§ Current funding is not (diverse) enough: allowable portions of projects and funding cycles are limited

§ Land availability takes time

What We Heard. There was as a strong consensus that the Estuary Partnership is both a convener and a facilitator for the partners and lower river, reinforcing the purposes of the Estuary Partnership when formed by the Governors and EPA in 1995. As a convener, participants wanted us to bring together key ‘lead entities’ periodically to work on evolving topics and make sure collectively we are covering regional needs, supporting each other, leveraging etc. As a facilitator, the Estuary Partnership should continue to be the voice for the estuary and region: identifying regional needs and strategies, supporting local needs, filling gaps in what others can do. Participants said we should continue as the lead on such activities as restoration priorities and strategic project development, establishing the importance of the estuary, providing access to technical assistance and expanding our effectiveness monitoring. And the goal is to increase on-the-ground results – not build more processes! The Estuary Partnership is convening a follow-up discussion June 5 that will focus on giving everyone the same understanding about what each key partner is doing.



Piles and a Derelict Vessel Removed from Coal Creek Slough

Over the last year, the Estuary Partnership has been leading a coordinated effort with the Bonneville Power Administration and the US Army Corps of Engineers to look at removing or enhancing pile structures on the lower Columbia River to benefit juvenile salmon. Yet, it was through a NOAA Marine Debris Grant that the Estuary Partnership removed our first piles. As part of a two part project, the Estuary Partnership removed 31 piles from Coal Creek Slough, a small slough to the lower Columbia River near Stella, Washington. For part two, the Estuary Partnership removed a 42-foot derelict vessel that had marred the Coal Creek shoreline for years. Thank you to NOAA for funding the Coal Creek Marine Debris removal project. Implementation not only benefited the Coal Creek Slough ecosystem, but provided valuable learning lessons for future projects.







Debrah

May – June 2009



Executive Director

Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership

811 SW Naito Parkway, Suite 410

Portland, Oregon 97204

503.226.1565 x227