 The Willamette River Valley is home to most of Oregon's citizens and a center of Oregon's economy. Its landscape is also a riverscape. The Willamette River ties together forested uplands, fertile agricultural lowlands, and fast-growing urban areas including Eugene and Portland. It provides habitat for salmon and steelhead as they migrate to and from the North Pacific Ocean. It is a major tributary in the Columbia Basin, which drains much of the Pacific Northwest. The valley is about 180 miles long and 100 miles wide, encompassing just under 12,000 square miles. Its formation began millions of years ago when collisions of tectonic plates and volcanic eruptions formed the coast in cascade ranges. These mountains now cradle the valley and support abundant forests important to Oregon's timber industry. Over 15,000 years ago, the valley began to fill a sediment left by major floods at the Columbia River, catastrophic by today's standards. Ice dams formed huge lakes in western Montana. Repeatedly over millennia, these ice dams collapsed, releasing enormous loads of water, ice, rock, and sediments down the Columbia and up into what is today the Willamette Valley. Later, these lake sediments were covered by alluvium, deposited during Willamette River flooding events. Today, these soils provide some of the best lands for agricultural production in Oregon. Farmers in the valley lead the world in rye grass seed and bushberry production, contributing to the culture and economy of the valley. Only 150 years ago, the river was a complex network of primary channels, side channels, and backwater areas. During winter floods, the river spread out over the lowlands, inundating over 300,000 acres of the valley. The Willamette is a managed river. 11 major reservoirs on tributaries to the river control floodwaters, provide irrigation water and power. These dams and other river controls have altered the system's natural hydrology and brought about some significant changes. The effects on the river include increased bank erosion, loss of riparian areas, and decreased native fish populations. Indeed, 30% of native fish species are endangered, threatened, or sensitive. With the areas projected growth trends, the pressure on the Willamette River and its watershed will only increase. As in other areas of the country, development outside of urban boundaries places a huge footprint on the land. Scientists, planners, and land managers are exploring new ways to consider the health of the watershed, while still meeting the expanding demands of society. Salmon play a major role in the economy, politics, and culture of the Willamette Valley as they do in all of the Pacific Northwest. The status of their populations is an effective indicator of the health of the landscape. Over the last century, populations of Pacific salmon species have declined dramatically throughout their ranges in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. The habitats of these fish extend all the way from the cold water streams of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, British Columbia, and Alaska. So it includes those freshwater streams, the rivers that these streams run into, the estuaries that the rivers run into before they meet the sea, and the North Pacific Ocean. It's a huge area of almost 1.5 million square miles. Because the life history stages of salmon are so far-reaching and cover such a broad area, the management of their populations and their habitats is as complex as their life cycles are. Management issues traverse international boundaries, state and federal boundaries, private land and federal land boundaries, and socioeconomic realities of dealing with all of these complexities. There are a number of significant anadromous fishes associated with our watersheds. The historic runs of salmon and steelhead on these streams are, of course, well-known, and with all of the impacts over the years. The fish are struggling in a number of ways, and so much of the work here is associated with water quality and restoring habitat so that the salmon and steelhead will be able to survive. Practices within the watershed not only adjacent to the river, but on the uplands above the river that can affect water quality and therefore habitat include grazing practices. There should be a good, wide buffer of riparian vegetation, riparian forest vegetation, in the case of the Lamont Valley, to protect the river, the riparian ecology and the processes that happen between the river and the land to protect not only the river, but the uplands as well. We're finding more and more that restoring ecological processes is much more effective at restoring salmon populations and water quality for humans than putting band-aids on rivers to keep them from flooding. Different species of Pacific salmon have used these watersheds in the Willamette Basin and all over the Pacific Northwest for hundreds of thousands of years. And they have withstood drought and floods and fires and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and they have persisted through all that time. And now they are faced with the challenges of what human impacts and land use impacts have placed on them. And they are an indicator of the resilience and the sustainability of an entire landscape. So for that reason alone, we think they are probably well worth protecting and their watersheds are worth protecting. The salmon are a wonderful icon and something that can motivate us and give us a sort of a visual, historical center perhaps. But it's overdone in the sense that the salmon are just part of a complex ecosystem. It's a great icon, but somehow we have to get our nose out of the river and look to the sides. Throughout the valley, progress is being made in improving the overall health of the watershed. John Miller truly sees the big picture when reading landscapes. His work spans the globe in the area of watershed restoration. In the Willamette Valley, he is involved in sustainable housing developments, the native plant nursery, and long-term planning initiatives. In a public sense, I'm involved in several volunteer efforts and in a private sense, we have several companies that are focused upon Willamette activities or related activities. We have Mahonia Vineyards and Nursery, which is a nursery which produces native plants and grape vines and grafts grape vines. And then Wildwood is an urban design and development firm that does urban developments. And we try to make both of those operations adhere to sustainable principles. I think too often we tend to separate our activities into sort of identifiable spheres and not look at them as a whole. And in this case, we're sitting in an urban development and it's adjacent to an agricultural operation as well. And the responsibility is on both of those operations to act responsibly and sustainably. It's a black twinberry. Growing native plants and using them in the landscape has lots of benefits. You don't have to use as much water generally. You don't have to use as much in the way of pesticides or herbicides. They don't take much maintenance because they grow fine as they are. It's a little more unruly looking in some cases, but I think that's part of the charm. Well, this is a Chardonnay vine and it's grafted onto a root stock that is naturally resistant to the root weevil that kills grape vines. In the public arena in 1996, Governor Kitzhaber asked me to chair his Willamette Basin Task Force, which was a group, a very diverse group of folks, including farmers and foresters and urban planners and government folks, conservation groups. And we basically looked at the Willamette Basin and said, how do we deal with the health of the watershed? And we very carefully defined watershed as from ridgetop to ridgetop, not just the water between the banks. And we came up with about three basic principles which include looking at the watershed as a whole, acting as a community instead of 110 separate jurisdictions in the basin, and also having a strategic framework to guide future actions. Miller realizes the complexity of sustaining the health of landscapes. He also understands the future of this valley hinges on tackling the biggest issue of all, growth. Farming is so much. Farming is in a decline, at least as we know it. And I'm afraid that's a trend, not a cycle. And so here we are with this huge growth looking at the valley in the face, probably a doubling in the next 40 years. And it's going to be hard enough to accommodate that gracefully with the laws we have, but the real problem is going to be the economics. Farm, farmland economically, it's going to be much more attractive for urban development. So the sprawl, in theory, can get worse. And there'll be a lot of pressure. The pressure of the level we've never known before in the valley to eat up farmland and forest land for cities. If we're going to change the form of our cities and our farms and our forests, we're going to have to listen to nature and use scientific data and change people's habits and do a whole bunch of stuff that is not always going to be predictable when it comes together. Learning about that process takes a great deal of commitment, time and vision. To help crystallize that vision and provide accurate and clear information for decision-makers, scientists have turned to digital technology. Stream ecologists Dan Gregory and landscape architect David Hulse are working together to create a virtual time machine fueled by historical and derived data. This new tool allows decision-makers and citizens to see the changes that have occurred in the Willamette Valley. Vegetation data collected by land surveyors in the 1850s were programmed into mapping software. Then Hulse was able to accurately simulate the past in a virtual flyover of the valley as it was 150 years ago. It was a much more complex system than today. The river's many channels overflowed into the lowlands during the annual winter rains, exchanging nutrients with the land. These floods also distributed sediments in the river and renewed wetlands and riparian forests with native seedlings. Flood waters felled riparian trees and carried them in haphazard fashion to the channels and flood plains. There, they became habitat for fish and other aquatic life. Calmer water in sloughs and side channels served as refuge for fish and curved the erosive power of the faster-moving water in the main channels. Mixed forests of trees and shrubs frame the channels, providing important habitat for wildlife. Wetlands and oak savannas added diversity to the valley's habitats. Go. Then Hulse turns the dials to the future and creates three visions of what this valley could become under plausible scenarios crafted by local stakeholders. For example, the conservation scenario places greater emphasis on ecosystem protection and restoration, while reflecting a reasonable balance between ecological, cultural and economic considerations. The differences are subtle, yet important in terms of the watershed's health. So what we see in the conservation scenario is that we are not envisioning a return to the 19th century conditions. What instead the conservation scenario is representing is a version of the future in which many of the ecological functions of the river that have been lost could be regained, while simultaneously allowing people to still get economic returns from the lands they own and manage. These scenarios are intended to give Oregonians a unique perspective on which to base their land-use decisions, decisions that will bring about the future they get. Currently, some elements of that old meandering river are closer to being restored. The Willamette needs room to move, but that need must take into account the landowners directly influenced by the river. This site represents one of the challenges of the interaction of riverine systems and human property values. Rivers are dynamic. Their channels are constantly changing as they erode material at one place and at the other. This provides critical habitats and provides nutrient exchange, food resources. It's a very important part of the way that rivers maintain their health, but it obviously creates huge problems for property owners. This is a site that was flooded in the flood of 1996, and the Willamette river cut a new channel through its floodplain, creating, again, as we see, complex habitat, large wood, fast water, slow water, and refuge in future floods. This is an important property of the river system, but how do landowners cope with this kind of channel change that cuts through their production property? One of the concepts that has been explored is the concept of meander corridors in which incentive systems, rental agreements, leases, property easements are used to allow the landowners to obtain resources or funds from their land, but dedicate it to dynamics of riverine systems and allow rivers to function naturally. This also can be coupled to the hydrologic restoration of rivers where we allow rivers to flood more and try not to control them quite as much, but this requires that the landowners be willing to accept the changes that are bound to occur during those floods. But this allows the river to come up, to the flood plains, and then to drop rapidly back into its channels. Quite different than the process that we see with flood control where quite often these rivers are maintained within bankful conditions for long periods of time with the channel eroding constantly right on that one confined bank and it's staying at flood flow for one to two weeks whereas normally it might come down in three to four days. So the approaches that we've talked about allow the river system and allow for restoration of flood plain forest to interact with those more dynamic channels. Many landowners are reinventing how they work the land. They're trying new ideas and sometimes discarding the practices of the past to create a more sustainable future. The Willamette Valley has some of the richest farmland in the world and Bill Chambers owns a piece of it. How he and his family have chosen to farm illustrates how alternative sustainable practices can compete in the local marketplace. Our farm is located here in the Willamette Valley. We're right in the flood plain. The river is just behind me here. The business is a row crop farming operation and then also a food processing facility where we take the crops that we grow and process them and freeze them with the idea being that we minimize the amount of energy used to transport the products to a processing facility. Any of the waste that is produced as part of the food processing stays on the farm. We use the wastewater for irrigation and then any of the processing waste is collected and either turned into compost and spread back out on the farm or we send that to a feedlot where it's used for feeding cattle and then we take that waste the cattle waste compost it and bring it back to the farm here is nutrient. So we're trying to cycle nutrients in as big a circle as we possibly can. For us the soil is not just a mineral sponge where we're putting in and taking out nutrients but it's actually an ecosystem where we're putting in the dominant species to manage and take care of the other species in the soil that's part of that ecosystem. Well one of the things that we're doing is trying to minimize the amount of tillage organic matter is very important to our growing crops it's where all of the nutrient reactions occur between the plant and the soil is through the organic matter so we're trying to preserve that and what we found is that tillage tends to combust or burn that because it exposes the organic matter to more oxygen and over time the organic matter in the soil declines. As an example of some of the alternatives that we use besides pesticides is planting cilantro in with our cauliflower and broccoli it's there to attract predatory insects to the field it's a predator-prey relationship and you have to keep the predators healthy for them to keep the prey under control. We still have small pockets of insects that cause these problems but we balance the cost of the insecticide against the damage that they do and we're so far ahead because of the savings on pesticides that we can live with some patches where the soil pests get ahead of the predators but it doesn't happen very long. Further away from the river nestled in the foothills of the Oregon coast range the Buchanan Century Farm is home to Taiyi wine cellars. Its rich soils and moderate cool climate have been likened to the great wine growing region They are well known for their award-winning Pinot Noir and they are also well known for their awareness and sensitivity to the local landscape. The Wyoming Valley at one time had large runs of salmon and steelhead and lots of wild cutthroat trout over the years some of those runs have dwindled and farmers in the valley are trying to with different programs trying to enhance and restore some of those salmon and steelhead and those cutthroat populations we at Taiyi wine cellars are trying to do our part by actually becoming enrolling in a program called salmon safe and what we're doing is planting in fact I'll show you here there's some tall grass here that we've got right along with Psi we used to spray roundup right in the rows we always mowed the aisle ways but the actual rows we used to just have bare ground because of roundup and we've planted a it's actually a hard fescue and it's a fairly low growing grass and it creates a nice carpet so the weeds don't take over but at the same time it keeps all the soil on the hillside and a lot of grapes are growing pretty steep hillside and by having this grass here the actual soil stays on the hillside where it belongs so it's good for the farmer it also doesn't go into the stream if you get sediment or soil in the stream you're going to have problems with the gills of the rearing fish you also have problems with spawning areas some of the gravel will get covered and it will get plugged up with sediment so that's a problem so in a sense by doing this we're helping the salmon we're helping our farm and it's a marketing tool because we can put on our wine bottles that we are salmon safe they encourage winery visitors to enjoy the natural beauty of their farm along a nature trail that winds through their native valley wetland and woodland habitats my family has had a heritage for over 100 years because they've kept over 100 acres of native woods along the creek and protected those native woods having the trees right next to the stream will cool those streams so we're planting a lot of native trees such as ash some local ponderosa pine some native cotton woods some people might think of a little crazy to get out there and plant trees but planting trees really gives me pleasure and in addition to that it's kind of a form of life after death because in a sense you know that those trees are going to be there long after you're pushing up daisies on the Buchanan farm the stewardship lessons of the generations have not been lost my dad died in 1968 but I think he'd be pretty happy now with this wetland reserve program that we set up because one of the things we're doing is the original meander, we're going back to that original meander so we're going to take out the straightened part of the stream and have the stream go back to the original meander and that's something I think he'd be proud of and I have a real hope that my daughter will be the fifth generation on the farm and my son too, but I think my daughter has more interest in it I just have a hope that she'll continue that heritage and she has a big strong interest right now in sustainability in protecting small farms and it's going to be exciting to see that continue at the gar farm, bed and breakfast guests could wander miles of trails through forests meadows and restored native wetlands the farm demonstrates land management strategies that restore and enhance the natural habitat Rob Tracy of the NRCS worked closely with the gar family throughout this restoration Ted and Harriet's interests are very broad primarily associated with ecological function and creating habitat that has been lost in the Willamon Valley so this is quite a unique property in that Ted and Harriet's property runs from the ridge which is heavily forested down across the foothill actually to the creek and the wetlands associated with the creek and that riparian corridor so we essentially have almost an individual watershed which gives us the opportunity to work with the number of plant communities and land uses as well as kind of model a larger watershed in changing our focus and actually our management we've turned towards natural habitat our interest included the plants and recovery of native plants in the area and we just let the wetlands recover on their own and we found that there was a great diversity of seeds in the seed bank that have been here for a number of years this place has been farmed since European settlement and it had been drained with a tile drainage system and chemicals and monoculture cropping that we know of intensively for 40 years so these seeds seem to have been ready for the situation I guess that somebody said build it and then we'll come or something like that well it's kind of the way it was here we found that the uplands were as equally or more important than even the water and so that inspired us to do some upland ponds and we have taken wet spots on the hills and created intermittent ponds that actually are used by tree frogs and red-legged frogs have been found up there you see them on a hot day jump in when you walk beside some of these ponds a few of them hold water throughout the year and so we think those are kind of heat refuge spots and so we felt that enhancing the uplands for amphibians was real helpful to them landscapes include our backyards and our backyards influence landscapes even small scale projects can make a difference home to their family business the purse property demonstrates an energetic vision for restoration of a natural wetland their investment of time and energy led to an appreciation of the abundance of wildlife that are dependent on wetland habitat so this project got going because we recognized that the field should have been wet and we wanted to make it wetter the place was right and that it was a really specific soil type that holds moisture in a way you can't imagine just a little bit of water and you get a puddle, it does not drain after a while you figure out what works and we've had lots of success with ash we're having good success with maple trees some spruce and willow lots and lots of willow there's something about restoring a place to wet that's pretty exciting because water changes the character of your property a lot as the river flows through time the Willamette Valley is ever changing the forces of nature and those of humans are all connected in determining what the valley becomes the challenges here seem daunting but through collaboration and a new understanding of this complex system of water shed we are more likely to sustain its people natural resources and landscape we try not to farm with a formula we try to have our eyes open all the time and say how can we make this better what is the best way to do that the real key to all of these efforts is doing something on the ground actually changing our habits that results in changes in the landscape we just have the ethic that we're stewards here on this piece of ground that we want to leave it in a better condition than when we found it and when we started farming here