Why hasn’t the Scott River’s channelization, confinement, and incision, which are the fundamental drivers of the loss of groundwater, instream flow, and associated habitat, been addressed to date? For decades the required scale of the restoration, and the social and economic complexity in achieving it, have been daunting and overwhelming barriers. However, with climate change, drought, regulatory, and economic pressures there is increasing recognition that now is the time to “Go big or go home” if we are to have any chance of warding off extirpation of species and the loss of human communities.
We must begin to ask ourselves: Can we design management strategies for working landscapes that include social and economic complexity? Can we learn how increasingly limited water resources can be managed to reconcile potentially competing uses in a balanced, sustainable condition? Can landowners meet curtailments, other regulatory obligations and maintain sufficient water in-stream for ecological needs while remaining financially viable? We believe the answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes!
The “Scott River Recovery Action Partnership Project” (“Project”) will integrate and make actionable existing restoration and management plans and prioritizations with a comprehensive geophysical and economic analysis, regulation issues and community engagement to achieve landscape scale recovery of the Scott River’s ecological function. The Project will:
- Evaluate the mainstem Scott River, across landownerships, to determine the necessary physical extent and type of restoration needed to achieve groundwater, streamflow and habitat conditions sufficient to support the natural and human communities of the watershed into the future.
- Providing resources to support local organizations and landowners in the pursuit of collecting critical information that can help adaptively navigate the complex issues of groundwater and surface water interactions, water quality, and the fisheries.
- Develop a comprehensive, holistic river plan with prioritized actions with identified benefits and challenges.
- Conduct economic analysis to determine the cost of acquisition of a sufficient riverscape and water rights to implement the required restoration.
- Integrate multiple existing planning and design efforts into the larger watershed understanding.
- Collaborate with multiple entities to plan, design and implement specific restoration actions that conform to the prioritization and plan.
- Engage with the community and regulatory agencies to obtain funding to purchase permanent access to the required riverine corridor where possible and implement the restoration necessary to maximize its value.
- Support the Scott River agricultural communities on-going economic sustainability by assisting it in meeting groundwater sustainability, drought curtailment, public trust and TMDL requirements.
- Provide a template that can be used in other basins within the Klamath and beyond on ways to achieve basin wide restoration that address Tribal, agricultural, and regulatory needs.
While regulation, flow standards and even litigation can result in improved ecological conditions, these aversive approaches create community division and social disruption and at times, delay efforts to get on the ground projects implemented. We propose a proactive vision and will develop a concrete cooperative plan to achieve results which will have a stronger chance of maintaining the Valley’s social and resource based economic cohesion, which, in the long run, will result in improved and sustainable outcomes. Economic compensation for repurposing for ecological purposes productive agricultural lands, supporting creative new agricultural approaches and potentially developing market-based incentives, similar to carbon and water markets, for proactive ecological practices can shift the drivers away from resource extraction to resource maximization.
On May 10, 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom extended an existing drought proclamation to the Klamath Basin including the Scott River, and in August of 2021 a curtailment of ground and surface water was imposed to achieve the California Department of Fish and Wildlife emergency in-stream flow requirements. The curtailment was imposed due to the increasing risk of extirpation of both Coho and Chinook salmon during the on-going drought emergency. While the ecological effects of the curtailment are yet to be understood, the disruption to the existing economic function of the agricultural community was immediate. The curtailment is a short term solution with a defined end date and will not achieve long term sustainability and recovery of anadromous fishes. A long term flow management strategy may emerge from the drought, however, experts agree that both flow management and restoration actions at a large scale are necessary to achieve recovery of aquatic species.
In spite of significant restoration investment over the past decades, fisheries and groundwater dependent ecosystems remain imperiled. It is common for restoration to take place based on landowner willingness and on a small, site-specific scale. These actions have been insufficient to restore ecological function of the Scott River and provide connectivity and habitat to support the Scott River’s Functionally Independent Core Population of Northern California Southern California Coho Salmon. The Integrated Fisheries Restoration and Monitoring Plan (IFRMP) states “Top priority stressors (limiting factors) currently identified for the Scott Sub-basin by working group participants include channel and floodplain connectivity and reconfiguration, and projects that restore these functions were indeed ranked higher by the IFRMP tool and are among the top group of restoration projects to be considered first for implementation.”