A Practical Restoration Model for Restoring the Sprague River Valley
The PBR planning model was developed to assist the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program in prioritizing processed based restoration projects in the Sprague River watershed in the southern Oregon Cascades. The Sprague River has a significant amount of floodplain levees and irrigation ditches which have disrupted floodplain and channel connectivity important for fish habitat. The model identifies floodplain spaces disconnected by infrastructure versus areas disconnected by incision alone. In doing so it provides practitioners with a planning tool to prioritize where to modify or remove infrastructure (e.g. levees or ditches) versus opportunities to apply “low-tech” approaches of installing natural infrastructure such as beaver dams and their analogs.
This was a collaborative effort between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Utah State University.
