Washington watershed sees chum salmon surge as river restoration nears completion

chum salmon Representative image In the early 1990s, fewer than 1,000 threatened summer-run chum salmon made it back to the Big Quilcene River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula each year. Decades of logging, road building and habitat degradation had left the river choked with sediment, its gravel spawning beds buried and its side channels disconnected. Today, the story looks very different. Thanks to a multi-agency, $9.7 million restoration effort that is nearing completion, recent returns to the Big Quilcene average about 32,600 adult chum annually, turning the watershed into one of the strongest strongholds for this imperiled population. As NOAA Fisheries reports, the project shows how targeted river restoration can help bring a threatened salmon run back from the brink.A watershed pushed to the edgeThe Big Quilcene River flows from the Olympic Mountains into Hood Canal, a deep fjord that supports some of the most productive salmon habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Summer-run chum salmon here are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, part of the Puget Sound/Georgia Basin distinct population segment.By the early 1990s, the run had collapsed. Historical logging and...