North Coast Coho Project

Our North Coast Coho Project (NCCP) is a partnership of unprecedented scale and scope.  Trout Unlimited, timber, gravel, and wine industry leaders, other private landowners, and state and federal agencies are working cooperatively to restore coho salmon runs in northern California. The NCCP assesses watershed conditions, develops and implements projects to reduce sediment input to streams, installs large woody debris and rocks to diversify instream habitat, and improves fish passage.  TU and our partners also conduct fish population monitoring to quantify steelhead, chinook and coho populations.  Since 1998, the Project has raised and invested about $9 million for restoration.

• TU and our partners have assessed and/or restored thousands of acres in the Mad, Hollow Tree and Standley creeks (South Fork Eel), Cottoneva, Ten Mile, Pudding, Noyo, Big, Albion, Navarro, Elk, Garcia, Gualala, and Russian River watersheds.
• The NCCP started with Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC) in the Garcia River watershed. TU worked on the South Fork of the Garcia with MRC, government agencies and others to develop and fund the project for the benefit of coho. The partners prevented 70% of the predicted road-related future sediment load from reaching the river, which is an amount equivalent to 3,500 dump trucks worth of dirt.
• Hawthorne Timber Company, LLC and Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc., both managed by Campbell Timberland Management, LLC, are engaging in similar efforts on several streams in California. These projects include road upgrades and decommissioned roads, sediment reduction and instream habitat enhancement on Pudding Creek, Ten Mile River and Standley Creek, some of the most important coho streams.
• MRC and Campbell are the dominant landowners in at least a dozen key coho watersheds or sub-watersheds.  Together with TU, the two companies and other private landowners are changing the face of several hundred thousand acres of forest land in Northern California.   The NCCP’s cooperative approach serves as a model for restoration work on California’s North Coast and elsewhere.
• To date, TU and its partners have improved or eliminated over 450 miles of logging roads, removed four major fish migration barriers, reconnected 17.5 miles of stream habitat, and installed over 250 instream structures to improve coho salmon and steelhead habitat.

For more information:

Lisa Bolton

Contact Lisa Bolton