Current Initiatives

Climate Adaptation Framework

What does climate change mean for salmon habitat and habitat restoration on the Washington coast? How do we restore what has been degraded in the past AND provide resilience to future change?

In 2021, the Coast Salmon Partnership launched an effort to tackle these issues. We gathered available information from regional experts and developed a climate resiliency framework to apply to habitat restoration in our region. This work identifies key habitats and tools to support climate resiliency for salmon, steelhead, and char in the Washington Coast Salmon Recovery Region.

Strong Salmon Future

Our goal is to increase social and financial support for salmon sustainability and salmon-related projects on the Washington coast. Social support is needed to implement habitat protection and restoration on critical salmon streams, and the cooperation of local landowners provides this support. Financial support is needed to sustain on-the-ground work that protects and restores salmon habitat.

The Strong Salmon Future campaign brings recognition to the people who are working on salmon recovery along the Washington coast. We are building a community of sustainable salmon supporters by sharing this work, educating landowners, and providing tools to prominent community members who will champion this movement.

Coldwater Connection Campaign

The Washington Coast supports abundant and diverse wild populations of salmon, trout, and char. However, access to high quality streams is limited by the more than 4,000 fish passage barriers across the landscape. These barriers function as a ‘miniature dam’ network and prevent fish access to cold water refuges in the summer and low flow refuges in the winter. The Coast Salmon Partnership is taking a landscape view to this problem and finding solutions with the greatest gains for salmon. In collaboration with our partners at the Wild Salmon Center and Trout Unlimited, we are supporting the work of local agencies and governments to prioritize fish barrier corrections and bring the salmon home.

Washington Coast Restoration & Resiliency Initiative

Healthy rivers, forests, and fish and wildlife habitat on Washington’s Coast are essential to our communities, ecosystems and economies. Coastal communities have worked tirelessly for decades with limited, inconsistent funding to improve the health of our lands and waters. The Coast continues to experience some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Given the urgency of both of these needs, this initiative provides a proactive approach to restoration that:

• addresses the region’s highest priority restoration needs;
• leverages existing funding;
• and puts people to work on the Coast restoring our water and lands

Prioritized Watershed Restoration

Watershed-scale restoration envisioned for the Prioritized Watershed Restoration (PWR) program improves our chances of creating and maintaining salmon habitat at a meaningful spatial scale within a defined time frame. The goal is to address the highest priority restoration and protection needs in single watersheds within a defined timeframe. The process is envisioned to be refined and replicated in multiple watersheds over time, with the initial focus in four sub-basins:

• Calawah River (North Pacific Coast Lead Entity)
• Clearwater River tributaries (Quinault Indian Nation Lead Entity)
• Newaukum River (Chehalis Basin Lead Entity)
• Middle Nemah River (Willapa Bay Lead Entity)