Regional partners along the California North Coast.

Angelo researchers are grateful for local and regional partners who share our interests of understanding the past, current, and future states of watersheds along the North Coast watersheds. Like some of our partners but not others, Angelo researchers do not take advocacy positions. We want to become well-informed about societal and environmental concerns along the North Coast in order to help shed light on the consequences of various choices or policies for the environment.

Eel River Recovery Project www.eelriverrecovery.org

In 2011, Eel River citizens concerned about diminishing flows, recovery of salmonids, and recent toxic algal blooms in the Eel River formed the Eel River Recovery Project (ERRP), with Patrick Higgins as its Volunteer Coordinator. Keith Bouma-Gregson, studying cyanobacteria for his dissertation at Berkeley, reached out to ERRP, starting a wonderful partnership.

Angelo researchers have benefited from (and assisted with) ERRP’s extensive monitoring of temperature, channel condition, and fish, which ERRP volunteers have freely shared with their partners. Angelo researchers, particularly Keith Bouma-Gregson, have participated in ERRP events in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Keith Bouma-Gregson has given educational talks for ERRP events about cyanobacteria and algae in the Eel, and ERRP in turn has been represented by great participants in our biennial Algal Forays at Angelo, in which we train interested citizens and students to identify algae, distinguishing “the good, the bad, and the structural”. links to Keith’s presentations

Keith training ERRP algal volunteer in simple quantitative algal monitoring transect method

Karuk Tribe (http://www.karuk.us)

Ron Reed, a Karuk dip net fisher and youth leader, on Middle Klamath River near the Ti Bar tributary, his family’s ancestral home, explaining plans for nursery habitat for coho by restoring tributaries. Photo by M. Power.

We are very grateful for our exchanges and friendship with members of the Karuk Tribe, the “Fix the Earth” people. Karuk live on their ancestral lands along the middle Klamath River, an amazingly beautiful, diverse, and rugged landscape. The Karuk-Berkeley Collaborative, founded in 2008, has provided many opportunities for Berkeley students and researchers to visit Karuk restoration projects in their ancestral lands, and for us to benefitfrom their visits to our study sites. Our Karuk friends and colleagues have helped us understand how tending by Native Californians structured and sustained rivers and forests of the North Coast. Karuk friends, along with Tom Carlson and Jenny Sowerwine, have hosted wonderful field trips for the Ecosystems of California class, and Karuk friends and leaders have visited our Angelo sites. We look forward to more scientific and educational collaboration with Karuk friends, scientists and youth over the years to come.

Berkeley students and faculty are already very actively engaged with facilitating UC Berkeley-Karuk scientific collaborations, helping to facilitate tribal youth leadership in science, and helping to design and conduct studies related to traditional land and cultural resource management.” We are excited to develop these collaborations.

Bill Dietrich explains studies at the Rivendell watershed to Karuk tribal members Bill Tripp and Ron Reed and Tom Carlson, IB faculty at Berkeley and a charter member of the Karuk-Berkeley Collaborative.

Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. http://www.rffi.org.

“RFFI is a non-profit organization of stakeholders, including loggers, environmentalists, community activists, foresters and others, working together to conserve forest lands and to protect biodiversity, mitigate climate change and improve the local economy in an equitable fashion.” -from the RFFI web site.

Fog makes RFFI lands promising for redwood forestry.

Angelo researchers are inspired by the vision of this community-based forestry group, and applaud their efforts to rehabilitate 50,000 acres of industrially logged redwood forest in the steep Usal basins along the South Fork Eel River, north of the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino Co. We admire RFFI’s goal of rehabilitating salmon-bearing rivers and recovering sustainably harvested redwood forests, sustaining both native species and human livelihoods along the North Coast.

Art and Judy Harwood host barbecue for RFFI meeting in their Usal Forest meeting.

Angelo researchers partnered with RFFI in a presentation at an Ecological Society of America Millenium Conference on Water and Social Justice (link to RFFI poster loaded into media link to poster). We have also joined them for discussions on their plans for a new environmental education center near Piercy, and on potential restoration of channels on their lands near the confluence of the North and South Fork Usal, At this site, RFFI is addressing the problem of logging legacies that triggered a landslide into the North Fork Usal channel. The sediment piled up in the channel, blocking summer passage for salmonids, leaving fish to die of heat shortly before the final reach that could convey them to the sea. One restoration hypothesis would be that digging out old anabranching channels–now filled with legacy sediments but still damply apparent, in a wetland shaded by mature alder canopy–could create cool “over-summering habitat” for maturing fish, allowing them to survive until winter floods escort them out of the river into the sea. This is one of several restoration ideas that RFFI and their partners are considering for their site.

Mature alder grove just above blocked reach of the low-flow Usal, where, if historic anabranching swales were dug below water table, out-migrating salmonids might be able to wait in cool water for the onset of the winter floods to convey them out to sea. Photo by M. Power.

Friends of the Eel River, FOER

links to Sarah Kupferberg, Mary Power, and Bill Dietrich presentations at Fortuna, 2011

Angelinos have learned a lot about the Eel and the Russian Rivers from field trips, presentations, and interactions with:

Eel Russian River Commission (www.eelrussianriver.org/);
Mendocino County Farm Bureau (http://www.mendofb.org/)

Karuk & RFFI

NCED and HydroWatch scientists collaborate with two citizen groups in northern California seeking to restore and manage forests in a way that increases their ecological resilience and their sustained value for local communities. One partner is the Karuk Tribe, whose ancestral forest practices and current restoration efforts may improve hydrologic cycles, river flows and temperatures for salmonids in the Middle Klamath Basin.

The other partner is Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI), a community based forestry association seeking to rehabilitate 50,000 acres of industrially logged redwood forest in the steep Usal basins along the South Fork Eel River, just north of the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino Co. All partners are seeking ways to make forests more resilient to climate change, improve salmon bearing rivers and increase the productivity of redwood forests, so that these iconic North Coast ecosystems sustain both native species and, where harvested, livelihoods for local human communities.

Web sites:

Eel River Recovery Project

Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc.

Karuk Tribe

University Partners:

Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology (BIGCB)

University of California Natural Reserve System

National and international scientific research networks:

NSF supported National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics

The infrastructure and research from 1989-2002 proved foundational for four large national research initiatives that were launched at Angelo. In 2002, Angelo was chosen to be the first collaborative field site for Earth scientists, environmental engineers, and ecologists in the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (NCED), an NSF Science and Technology Center (Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, U. Minn, Director). NCED scientists and engineers (three from Berkeley, including myself) collaborated for ten years to study biota, ecosystems and landscape processes change down the river network. In 2006, Angelo was selected site for the Keck Hydrowatch, a Berkeley program funded by the Keck Foundation (Inez Fung, Director). Angelo has also been a test bed and launching platform for the NSF National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM, Bill Dietrich, PI), as a site where this advanced mapping technology faces the extreme challenge of rugged topography and tall, dense forest. Most recently, in October 2013, nine Berkeley scientists, including 4 National Academy members, were awarded $5M over 5 years to study interactions of moisture stored in soils and deep bedrock, trees, upland-river-ocean food web linkages, with an eye to forecasting consequences of land cover and climate change (particularly drought). Based at the Angelo Reserve, the Eel River Critical Zone Observatory (NSF, Bill Dietrich, Director) could, if successful, be renewed for multiple five-year terms over the future. In addition to funding undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral research, the Eel River CZO grant provides $5000/year for outreach, which I am leading.
NSF supported Center for Airborne Laser Mapping NCALM)
Keck Hydrowatch, Berkeley Institute of the Environment

Field station users and supporters, within California, nationwide, and internationally.

University of California Natural Reserve System

The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund

Before 2002, research at Angelo was severely limited by lack of laboratory space, which was limited at that the time to a 12’ x 12’ single room in the dilapidated Headquarters building. In 2000, the Goldman Fund generously provided a $1.2 million gift for the construction of

the Environmental Science complex (with a large classroom, 2 laboratory and 2 office/microscopy rooms, an outdoor sample preparation and lathe house;and
a Canopy Access facility: a river-to-ridge transect formed by 5 ~60-m tall redwood trees linked by Burma bridges. Three viewing and instrument deployment platforms are secured to each tree at three heights with webbing. The entire facility is built without nails or other structures that might harm the trees.

The David and Louise Packard Foundation generously supplemented this award with a grant of $0.1M.