As part of our mission to work collaboratively with all residents of our watersheds, we welcome you to become a part of that mission. Here, you will find educational resources about watersheds and the plants and animals that live around us. You will also find technical resources for private landowners who are considering embarking on habitat enhancement and restoration projects on their own land.
Developing a plan to restore or improve your land can be a challenge. One way to approach this is to adopt an adaptive management approach. First, learn everything you can about what opportunities for assistance is out there. This could be in the form of grants, tax incentives, or free technical assistance.
Second, make a plan. From everything you learned, create a plan. This plan could be long-term or short-term, a small streamside plot or multiple acres, and could have a single goal or a multi-layered enhancement project.
Next, implement the plan. Whether you are receiving assistance from your local soil and water conservation district, local water council, or doing it all on your own, this is when the learning and planning come together.
And then monitor your efforts. This is where the adaptive part of adaptive management begins. Survivability monitoring, species counts, and change over time can signal whether your efforts are seeing success or alert you to change things up.
The process then begins again, taking what you learned from monitoring and augmenting your initial plan. The cycle repeats itself until the project is deemed a success.
Which of these blackberries are native to the Pacific Northwest? How do you live with wildlife? Are lamprey a fish or an eel?
If you have some questions, we have some answers.