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The Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages over 800,000 hectares of forested state trust lands and 20,000 kilometers of forest roads in Washington State. Forest harvest and road reconstruction decisions greatly impact the agency’s cash flows and its ability to meet its fiduciary obligations. We introduce a mixed-integer programming model that integrates harvest and road scheduling decisions. We show how DNR embedded the new model in its workflows and applied it to the Upper Clearwater River Landscape in the Olympic Experimental State Forest. We find that the forest valuation of the Upper Clearwater increased by $0.5–$1 million (0.4–1.1 percent) because of the new method, which allowed the DNR to concentrate capital expenditures in support of harvest and road operations in both time and space. This led to a 14.5 percent reduction in the size of the active road network. DNR is now in the process of scaling the new approach to the entire forest estate.

The placement of instream structures to improve habitat for salmon and other fishes is one of the oldest and most common habitat improvement techniques. Since 2004, the Washington State Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) has been evaluating 23 instream habitat restoration projects by using a before–after control–impact (BACI) design. Sites (i.e., paired impact and control reaches) were monitored once before restoration implementation and several years after implementation on a rotating schedule (at years 1, 3, 5, and 10). Vertical pool profile area, mean residual profile depth, large wood (LW), and fish densities were quantified. Volume of LW increased significantly by year 10, while vertical pool profile area, mean residual profile depth, and fish densities did not significantly increase or meet the management targets (20% increase) by year 10. Increases in LW were expected given the restoration treatments (LW and engineered log jam additions). Vertical pool profile area and mean residual profile depth initially significantly increased (at years 1 and 3), though the results were no longer significant by year 10. The lack of a significant response in geomorphic metrics and juvenile fish by year 10 may be due to the low number of sites that were monitored for 10 years after restoration, but it is more likely due to challenges with implementing the monitoring program. These challenges included sample timing across years, poorly matched impact and control reaches, data management, and limitations in the monitoring protocols and metrics that were used. Our results demonstrate the importance of proper implementation of monitoring programs and suggest that future research and monitoring of instream projects should consider stratifying by ecoregion, seasonal fish sampling (summer and winter), improved habitat survey methods, more rigorous selection of impact and control reaches, critically assessing and clearly defining success, and the use of a posttreatment design.

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Global climate models suggest dramatic changes in the timing and form of future precipitation in the Pacific Northwest, United States. By some estimates, in the Columbia River drainage, basin‐wide snow‐water equivalencies could decrease by more than 50% before the end of the century, with locally more extreme variation. In the South Fork Clearwater River, Idaho, where hydraulic barriers are currently thought to partially limit ESA‐listed steelhead migrations, changes in precipitation that could exacerbate the intensity and timing of hydraulic barriers presents an obvious conservation concern. Evidence indicates that the strongest steelhead swimmers are capable of sustaining burst speeds for up to 20 s, with maximum speed being a function of fish size (length). Understanding hydraulic dynamics that have implications for migrating fish requires integration of high‐resolution hydraulic models with sufficient resolution to characterize the hydraulic experience of the fish. Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) have recently emerged as useful platforms for measuring river ecosystems with high precision. Results from habitat surveys and hydraulic modeling can identify locations where intense hydraulic energy may preclude fish passage during critical migration periods. The current as well as future range of discharges can be evaluated with a spatially explicit hydraulic model to quantify when, where, and how long barriers to migration exist. Further, this approach provides a powerful tool for manipulating the digital physical channel form and presents a heuristic opportunity to test hydraulic scenarios to improve migration success. This article is categorized under:   Water and Life > Nature of Freshwater Ecosystems   Water and Life > Stresses and Pressures on Ecosystems   Water and Life > Methods