Nick Weber

Biogenic features such as beaver dams, large wood, and live vegetation are essential to the maintenance of complex stream ecosystems, but these features are largely absent from models of how streams change over time. Many streams have incised because of changing climate or land-use practices. Because incised streams provide limited benefits to biot...

Beaver have been referred to as ecosystem engineers because of the large impacts their dam building activities have on the landscape; however, the benefits they may provide to fluvial fish species has been debated. We conducted a watershed-scale experiment to test how increasing beaver dam and colony persistence in a highly degraded incised stream...

The goal of salmonid habitat monitoring programs is to measure habitat attributes linked to salmonid productivity based on protocols that have sufficient precision to detect environmental variation at relevant spatial and temporal scales. Benthic macroinvertebrate community composition often is evaluated as part of habitat monitoring and assessment...

Beaver are an integral component of hydrologic, geomorphic, and biotic processes within North American stream systems, and their propensity to build dams alters stream and ripar-ian structure and function to the benefit of many aquatic and terrestrial species. Recognizing this, beaver relocation efforts and/or application of structures designed to...

The following document outlines a low-tech process-based (LTPBR) restoration design for a 0.7 - mile section of Whychus Creek, a tributary to the upper Deschutes river in Jefferson and Deschutes Counties. The following restoration design for the Willow Springs Preserve was developed following low-tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) principles (...

The Low-Tech Process Based Restoration of Riverscapes Pocket Guide is an illustrated and condensed version of the Design Manual (http://lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu). The pocket guide is designed to fit in your pocket (4 x 6") to use as a reference in the field.

Year end report of monitoring efforts for the evaluation of steelhead and their habitat's response to implementation of Beaver Dam Analog stream channel restoration. Monitoring components include: temperature, stream discharge timing, beaver activity surveys, surface water extent surveys, juvenile steelhead abundance, density, growth and movement,...

Chapter 6 of Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration of Riverscapes: Design Manual (http://lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu) •Key phases of restoration project implementation include obtaining regulatory consultations and permits, construction, monitoring and adaptive management. •Application of beaver dam analogues (BDAs) and post-assisted log structure...

Chapter Four of Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration of Riverscapes: Design Manual (http://lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu Post-assisted log structures (PALS) and beaver dam analogues (BDAs) are hand-built structures. PALS mimicand promote the processes of wood accumulation; whereas BDAs mimic and promote beaver dam activity. •PALS and BDAs are perme...

The following describes continued progress toward assessment of Chinook salmon populations and habitat restoration opportunities within the upper Grande Ronde River (UGR) and Catherine Creek (CC) watersheds using a life-cycle modeling (LCM) framework. The work presented here extends LCM development efforts previously initiated by the Columbia River...

Slides from a presentation shared with stakeholders during field tour and meeting to Spring Hollow with Upper Deschutes Watershed Council.

Stream and vegetation responses to beaver dam analogs on the South Fork of the Crooked River, Oregon

This document summarizes the work products that ISEMP and CHaMP produced. Much of this work was done in collaboration with State and Tribal fishery and habitat agency staff and other BPA FWP projects. All of the work was done to support specific tributary habitat monitoring and evaluation objectives under the 2008 Biological Opinion for listed salm...

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/srep28581.

This document describes the restoration and monitoring design developed as part of a stream and riparian restoration project on Bear Creek, a tributary of Bridge Creek and the Lower John Day River in Wheeler County, OR.

Closed population models are commonly used to estimate stream salmonid abundances using mark–recapture information collected during electrofishing surveys. To meet the model assumption of geographic closure, block nets are often used to prevent emigration and immigration of fish during the survey. Increased sampling and tagging efforts in an open s...

The Bridge Creek Intensively Monitored Watershed (IMW) project was launched in 2007 as a watershed scale restoration experiment designed to test whether encouraging beaver activity could improve habitat to the benefit of a threatened steelhead population. Currently in its 7th year of post restoration monitoring, the Bridge Creek project offers insi...

Experiential learning opportunity in research and restoration for undergraduates at OSU Cascades.

This report is designed to summarize the lessons learned and policy implications from the implementation of Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP; BPA Project 2003-017-00) and the Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program (CHaMP; BPA Project 2011-006-00) during 2015. ISEMP and CHaMP are addr...

Steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) of the Pacific Northwest co-evolved with the once ubiquitous American beaver (Castor canadensis). Extirpation of beaver and their associated dams are thought to have had negative impacts on stream function in desert watersheds where high water temperatures, low water levels. And simplified habitat can limit steelhead...

Bridge Creek, a tributary to the Lower John Day River, flows through the high-desert of central Oregon and serves as an important spawning and rearing stream for Mid-Columbia Steelhead. Much of Bridge Creek suffers from a high degree of channel incision and features an overall lack of habitat complexity, hydrologic disconnection from groundwater an...

Beaver dam analogues (BDAs) are channel-spanning structures that mimic or reinforce natural beaver dams (Figure 23). As such, they are semi-porous to water, sediment, fish and other water-borne materials. Like natural beaver dams, BDAs are biodegradable, temporary features on the landscape with functions that change in response to the effects of fl...

This combined report for Bonneville Power Administra-tion (BPA) Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP; BPA Project 2003-017) and the Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program (CHaMP; BPA Project 2011-006) covers Calendar Year (CY) 2014. Here we give an update on ISEMP’s progress and lessons learned as we work toward the end of the...

Criteria used to characterize lotic salmonid habitat suitability are often based on correlations between physical habitat characteristics and salmonid abundance. Focusing on physical habitat features ignores other habitat components, such as an adequate food supply, that limit the amount of energy available for growth and survival. We tested the de...

Research into, and monitoring of, listed spring Chinook and steelhead and their habitat under the Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP) advanced the science and knowledge of fish and habitat relation-ships over the course of 2012. In one of the few instances in the field of effectiveness monitoring, ISEMP demonstrated that...

The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Project (ISEMP) was created nearly 10 years ago to systematically answer questions such as “what is the best way to measure stream habitat?” and “what is the best way to measure salmonid populations?”. These questions are related to the management that underpins the proposed tributary habitat-based, off -site...

Changes to fish habitat are driven by geomorphic processes occurring at the catchment, landscape (immutable and human induced characteristics), geomorphic reach, and geomorphic unit (pools, riffles, and bars) scales. The geomorphic processes shaping fish habitat need to be strongly considered in order to determine the effects of management practice...

Fish select habitat based on the suitability of the habitat to provide areas to forage, rest, provide thermal refugia, breed, and avoid predators. Streams with a high degree of habitat complexity can potentially provide a greater range of habitats and thus decrease fish movement throughout a stream. Conversely, poor habitat quality might make movem...

Livestock grazing in riparian zones affect many natural processes that are important in the formation and maintenance of steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) habitat. The loss of critical habitat for many steelhead populations led to the installation of riparian fencing with the objective of removing grazing to improve steelhead habitat in the John Day...

Fish production is often used as quantitative measure of population performance and is key goal of steelhead and salmon recovery. Three key metrics of freshwater production are abundance, growth, and survival. By using individually marked fish more precise estimates of these metrics are now possible. A multitude of abiotic and biotic factors can in...

Aerial photography has been used for decades to evaluate changes in the landscape; however the low resolution of these photos limits their use in documenting changes in stream morphology relevant to fishes. More recently high resolution digital photography and different platforms such as blimps and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been demonstr...

Criteria used to characterize lotic salmonid habitat are often based on observed correlations between physical habitat characteristics and salmonid abundances. A focus on physical habitat features ignores other habitat components, such as an adequate supply of food that set the physiological limitations on salmonid growth and survival. This study o...

The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP – BPA project #2003-0017) has been created as a cost effective means of developing protocols and new technologies, novel indicators, sample designs, tools and skills for analysis, data management and communication, and restoration experiments that support the development of a region-...