Whitcher Creek Large Wood Installation

Whitcher Creek is a tributary to West Fork Dairy Creek which is located in the Dairy McKay subbasin. Much of this creek is located in managed timber lands and displays excellent habitat potential for Coho. 

Whitcher Creek Large Wood Installation is the first project to be developed by the Tualatin River Watershed Council as a direct result of the field validation phase of the NetMap Pilot Project. Although Whitcher Creek was called out in our NetMap analysis as displaying excellent steelhead intrinsic potential (IP), what we found during our site visit was that our NetMap analysis needed some further calibration. Although not ideal for steelhead IP, the stream displays geomorphologic features more suitable to Coho. According to the US Forest Service, intrinsic potential can be defined as “The measure of a stream's capacity to provide high-quality habitat for coho and steelhead”.

The goal of this project is to enhance complexity, water storage, and floodplain connectivity by capturing transient wood and mobile bedload (gravels). This wood placement project will be implemented along an approximately 2 mile reach in cooperation with Stimson Lumber who manages the land. Stimson will provide the trees for the large wood structures and perform the instream wood placements 

Stay tuned for more updates on this project work after implementation this summer of 2022.