Ecologically Sustainable Water Management & Restoration Projects Tour
Thursday, March 8

This exciting field tour will focus on the Dutch Bill Watershed in Western Sonoma County, which is a tributary of the lower Russian River Basin. Within the 1500 sq/mi Russian River Basin, the 11sq/mi Dutch Bill Watershed is considered to be one of the most critical watersheds for the recovery of endangered coho salmon and steelhead. Dutch Bill creek has been a key source of genetically unique fish for the historic Coho Broodstock, recovery and monitoring programs. From Rivermouth to Ridgeline this field tour will comprehensively offer an eco-smorgasbord of applied watershed restoration techniques. There may be no other watershed in the region that within a seven-mile drive you can witness such a plethora and diversity of implemented watershed restoration tools and ideas. Brock Dolman director of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s WATER Institute will host the tour. Staff from the Gold Ridge RCD to discuss the various projects they have implemented will join us. Tour will also have restoration specialist Doug Gore of Dragonfly Stream Restoration, who has been the guy ‘doing the work’ in the creek for years. With Doug we will be able to view and discuss his numerous instream projects such as digger logs, vortex weirs, boulder clusters, biotechnical willow bank stabilization, as well as fish passage projects such as culvert to bridge replacement, boulder step weirs and concrete fishway renovation. We will also discuss fish passage issues associated with the engineering, planning & funding of mitigating a large county road box culvert and the pending removal of the 60+-year-old Camp Meeker dam.

Continuing upstream to the headwaters we will visit a proposed residential/commercial development site and discuss a number of stormwater Low Impact Development ideas. We will view our educational watershed road signs and interpretive watershed divide display in downtown Occidental. The second half of the day will be spent touring demonstration projects of upland watershed restoration tactics. For lunch we will head uphill to California’s eighth oldest certified organic farm at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s 80-acre campus. Numerous regenerative watershed projects have been implemented on this land to help inspire ideas for watershed friendly human settlement patterns. We will observe newly constructed “PWA” style road renovation projects, such as culvert replacements & repair, sediment basins, out sloping, rolling and critical dips. We will walk & talk about numerous applications of stormwater infiltration devices that slow, spread and sink surface flows to help reduce sediment and increase groundwater recharge. Discussions will be had concerning OAEC’s forest management, fire and fuel load reduction projects, use of controlled burns & mowing for coastal prairie restoration, Sudden Oak Death treatements, invasive plant species control, small woody debris headcut mitigation projects, wildlife habitat enhancements, rainwater harvesting irrigation pond and much more! Discussions will also include community based watershed organizations as part of the solutions, based on OAEC’s experience of supporting the organization of citizen based watershed councils through its Basins of Relations Training over the past seven years. All in all this tour will truly provide many diverse and thought provoking opportunities to think, see and act like a watershed towards a vision of Salmonid Restoration.