Upper Long Bar Restoration Project

Funders: Wildlife Conservation Board, Fisheries Restoration Grant Program, and Yuba Water Agency

Partners: Cramer Fish Sciences, verdantas eco engineering, Silica Resources Inc., Yuba Water Agency

In late 2021, SYRCL was awarded a grant from the Wildlife Conservation Board to begin planning, permitting, and collecting base-line data for a salmonid rearing habitat restoration project at Upper Long Bar. The project team is made up of the same partners who worked together to implement the Lower Long Bar project and Rose Bar project. On this project, Yuba Water Agency is also contributing project design.

The primary goal of SYRCL’s habitat enhancement along the lower Yuba River is to improve juvenile salmonid rearing habitat productivity, complexity, and diversity to support diverse life history strategies.

Enhancement efforts will aim to increase the carrying capacity of the system by improving quantity and quality of available habitat. In particular, enhancements which support the “stream-type” life history strategy where spring-run Chinook juveniles rear over summer and outmigrate during the next fall and winter may improve population resiliency and support outmigration at a larger size.

Anticipated biological outcomes of rearing habitat enhancement include increased juvenile growth, survival, and subsequent contribution to spawning adults.

The Upper Long Bar project will support juvenile salmonid rearing across a broad temporal and spatial range by providing:

Sustainable and seasonally functional habitat structure (i.e., complexity, sinuosity, diversity, instream structures and over-hanging cover)
High food availability and quality
Predator refugia
High flow refugia

Provided habitat structure will be tailored towards the requirements of rearing salmonids and exclude habitat preferences of non-native predators and competitors, thereby reducing the risks they present.

We are excited to begin construction in the summer of 2026.

Image of the Yuba River at Long Bar with sky and trees

Project Landmarks

Funding received from the Fisheries Restoration Grant Program

Up Next

The Fisheries Restoration Grant Program (FRGP) through the California Department of Fish and Wildlife was established in 1981 in response to rapidly declining populations of wild salmon and steelhead trout and deteriorating fish habitat in California. FRGP administers a competitive grant program that has invested millions of dollars to support various projects throughout coastal California. The overall goal of FRGP is to recover and conserve salmon and steelhead trout populations through restoration activities that reestablish natural ecosystem functions, to ensure the survival and protection of the species in California.

Final Designs Completed

April 22, 2025

Pre-Project Vegetation Monitoring

April 23, 2024

Gallery

Pre-Project Monitoring Wrapped Up

December 23, 2023

Pre-project monitoring kicks off

October 1, 2021

Public outreach meeting

November 2, 2023

On Thursday, November 2, 2023, representatives from SYRCL, Cramer Fish Sciences, and cbec led a public outreach meeting at the Upper Long Bar…

On Thursday, November 2, 2023, representatives from SYRCL, Cramer Fish Sciences, and cbec led a public outreach meeting at the Upper Long Bar Restoration Project, outlining for those in attendance the history of the project, a general overview of the pre-project monitoring and what the project will encompass, and the desired outcomes of the finished project.

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