Pilchuck River Landowner's Guide to Flooding and Erosion

Goals of this project are to:

1. Provide a visual tool for landowners in flood-prone Puget Sound watersheds like the Pilchuck to help understand some of the causes and fixes for chronic flooding and property damage from unnatural erosion. Turns out, many of the same prescriptions are also part of the cure for fish problems in the Pilchuck and many watersheds like it. The Pilchuck in particular has a longtime legacy among steelhead anglers as producing particularly robust specimens! Our goal is to restore that legacy.
2. Provide a catalyst for continuing conversations with area landowners who might be interested in having some restoration work done on their land.
3. Provide a tool for local TU members to engage their neighbors who might have potential project sites on their land.

1. We utilized exaggerrated 3-D imagery at a watershed scale to demonstrate how hardening, straightening and pinching rivers creates pressure points downstream where property damage from flooding and unnatural erosion are likely to occur, and how reconnecting floodplains and restoring natural features of river systems like intact riparian zones, wetlands, structure and meanders can relieve those pressure points effectively.
2. We then created clickable detailed inset illustrations to show several different restoration project types, so landowners can get a sense of what project types might look like on their land.

Coming soon.

Alan Moore - TU Northwest Director of Habitat Programs

Alan Moore - TU Northwest Director of Habitat Programs