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OMSI Science Pub: Salmon Super Highway
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
With Leah Tai, Hydrologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Salmon are always on the run. Traveling thousands of miles throughout their lives. In Oregon’s Tillamook- Nestucca watershed, the fish travel along many rivers, streams, and tributaries, swimming from their natal streams deep inland to the ocean and back again. They travel along the interconnected waterways like a car on a highway. However, over the last 60 years, that highway has become increasingly disconnected due to barriers threatening fish populations, ecosystems, recreation, and industry.
The Salmon Super Highway is an unprecedented effort to address fish passage barriers in the Tillamook and Nestucca Bay watersheds in Oregon’s North Coast. This work is restoring access to almost 180 miles of blocked habitat throughout six major salmon and steelhead rivers. A unique community partnership has been working for over a decade using a strategic, scaled approach to maximize benefits and minimize costs. The initiative is reconnecting historic habitats, reducing chronic flooding, improving recreation opportunities and stimulating the local economy, both now and for the future.
Leah Tai is a hydrologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, focusing on surface water, ecosystem restoration, fish passage, and wildfire response. Her primary duties include providing technical assistance and project management on stream restoration projects, hydraulic modeling to inform concept designs for landscape restoration, and developing monitoring strategies for instream work, including dam removal, aquatic organism passage and floodplain reconnection. Leah received her M.S. in Water Resource Engineering at Oregon State University in 2015. She spent five years with the Forest Service on the Oregon Coast, focusing on the Salmon SuperHwy strategic fish barrier removal initiative. She now works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based in Bend, OR, to promote conservation and restoration rooted in process-based design and integrated partnerships. In her free time, she enjoys running, rafting and skiing with her two children, dog and fellow water-nerd partner, Joe.