Keeping Clean Water Clean

Southern Oregon is blessed with many waterways that are home to a number of different native fish and mammals.  The Southern Oregon Land Conservancy is dedicated to protecting our waterways through careful, strategic land conservation.  Areas of focus include riparian areas, wetlands, vernal pools, and fish-bearing streams.

Riparian Areas, Wetlands, and Vernal Pools
Protecting riparian areas, wetlands, and vernal pools is essential to ensuring long-term watershed protection and water quality. Riparian areas are the vegetated lands adjacent to streams, rivers, marshes, and shorelines that form the transition between the land and water environments.  Wetlands are lands that are inundated by surface or ground water often enough to lead to the development of hydric soils and groups of plants and animals adapted for life in saturated soils.
Vernal pools are seasonally wet pools and swales that have associated plants and animals that are adapted to short periods of growth and reproduction within the inundated or drying pools. There may be long dormant periods and extreme variation of rainfall.

Riparian areas, wetlands, and vernal pools offer many benefits to nature and humans. These include:

• Mediating surface water flows by retaining water in the soil, slowly releasing the water and recharging groundwater;
• Reducing the impact of upland sources of pollution by trapping, filtering and converting sediments, nutrients and other chemicals;
• Maintaining the integrity of stream channels and shorelines reducing erosion; and
• Providing habitat, food, thermal protection, and breeding areas for fish, local and migratory birds, amphibians, insects and other wildlife and plants.

Riparian areas, wetlands, and vernal pools occur in low lying areas throughout the Rogue Basin. However, their extent has been severely diminished over the last 150 years of settlement. While some of these features enjoy federal and state protection, many others in private ownership are located near development and are likely to suffer from further loss and degradation without additional conservation measures in place.

Fish-Bearing Streams
The Rogue River Basin is known as a valuable habitat for numerous species of fish. Included are large numbers of anadromous and resident salmonid fish, notably fall chinook, coho salmon, winter and summer steelhead trout, and rainbow and cutthroat trout. Non-salmonid fish are also present, including lampreys, suckers, and sculpin.

Most streams and rivers in the Basin have been altered through logging, mining, road building, and other development that has taken a toll on the native fish populations. Protection of fish-bearing streams is of high value to communities and for the ecological health of the region. Survival of anadromous fish is of primary concern; coho salmon habitat, in particular, requires low-gradient valley stream courses that are most often found in private ownership.

Home Page Photo Credit: Thomas Kirchen Photography