Spring run chinook salmon are a threatened species on the Yuba. The restoration project at the Rose Bar project site is focused on enhancing the amount and quality of spawning habitat. Redd surveys provide quantifiable restoration results in addition to supplying an index of how the salmon population is doing.
Lower Yuba River

The storm that swept through Nevada County between the 23rd and 25th of October dropped between seven and twelve inches of much needed precipitation. This rainfall has led to, among other things, increased flows in the Yuba River and SYRCL’s ‘first flush’ event.
We sat down with our resident hydrologist, Karl Ronning, to learn more about this ‘first flush’ event and to discuss the results of our water quality monitoring.

SYRCL has been working alongside its partners for a decade to restore the lower Yuba River by creating spawning and rearing habitat for the threatened Chinook salmon. Our newest project is planned for a stretch of the lower Yuba called Rose Bar. We are inviting the public to join us for a tour of the project area on Friday, December 3rd.

The storm that swept through Nevada County between the 23rd and 25th of October dropped between seven and twelve inches of much needed precipitation. This rainfall has led to, among other things, increased flows in the Yuba River.
We sat down with one of our SYRCL scientists to learn more about how this rain event interacted with the Hallwood Side Channel and Floodplain Restoration Project, a restoration effort that SYRCL has been working on and committed to for the past five years.

Seven years ago, SYRCL began the first project in the Lower Yuba River to restore salmon habitat.
In 2011 and 2012 SYRCL planted nearly 6,500 willow and cottonwood cuttings across 5 acres to improve the floodplain habitat that fish use during high flow periods as refuge from swift moving water in the main river channel.
One goal of this project was to increase riparian vegetation which would provide improved fish habitat through the increase in shading, cover, food availability, and creating geomorphic and hydraulic complexity on the floodplain.