For the mid-Columbia Steelhead, an anadromous fish species, BPA has determined that if conducted in accordance with the applicable terms and conditions identified in the ESA Consultation Biological Opinion (BO) and Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act Essential Fish Habitat Consultation, for BPA's Habitat Improvement Program (HIP), the Tapteal Bend Restoration Project meets the requirements of consistency and no further consultation is required. Fish & Wildlife Service has concurred with that determination (July 28, 2004).
It was determined that the project may affect, but is not likely to adversely affect bull trout, and the U.S. It is difficult to determine if bull trout occur within the Tapteal project area and Dave Carl of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife was contacted and concurred with this assumption. The pygmy rabbit, bald eagle, and Ute ladies'Tresses are not known to occur in the immediate project vicinity, and it was determined that the proposed restoration project would have no effect on these species. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) listed species that may occur in the general vicinity of the project area are the pygmy rabbit, bald eagle, bull trout, Ute ladies'-tresses, and mid-Columbia Steelhead. (April 4, 2004), and meets the standards and guidelines for the Watershed Management Program Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD). The NEPA compliance checklist for this project was completed by Darrel Sunday, a contractor with Sunday and Associates, Inc. Long-term photo-point and plot sampling will also be implemented to evaluate the effectiveness and success of the restoration project. The proposed project includes: The installation of a bio-engineered streambank that incorporates barbs to capture silt and deflect flow, roughened rock or log toes, a riparian buffer, soil reinforcement, more » and bank grading. There is no development planned for the island.
This project will also result in the acquisition of Fox Island, a 12-acre island directly across the river from the restoration area. The Bonneville Power Administration is proposing to fund the restoration of approximately 500 feet of streambank along the Yakima River at river mile 8, upstream of the Van Giesen Bridge on SR 224, in and between Richland and West Richland, Washington. The watershed scale optimization method developed here hold the promise serve as an effective tool to explore tradeoffs between economic costs, water quality improvements, and decisions makers and stakeholders’ concerns in BMPs design, thereby informing sustainable watershed scale water resources management. In addition, we found that cross-subwatershed coordination and targeting flood season instead of year-round water quality standards could pronouncedly reduce economic cost of BMP implementation while not substantially degrade water quality. We found substantial discrepancy between these two scenarios with respect to type and spatial configuration of BMPs and associated economic costs, highlighting the need of reconciling concerns from different stakeholders in order to arrive at a BMP plan that all parties will agree upon.
With the watershed model and the multi-objective optimization algorithms, we explored potential effectiveness of BMPs under two scenarios that are currently being considered: scenario 1 assumes funding of BMP implementation is from national grants and targets high water quality standard, while scenario 2 assumes funding is from farmers and targets water quality that barely meet the drinking water standard. Further, we developed a Markov Chain based multi-objective optimization program to explore optimal BMPs with tradeoffs between economic costs and water quality responses. the Soil and Water Assessment Tool) in the Miyun more » Reservoir Watershed (MRW), and calibrated and validated it using long term sediment, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) data. In this study, we built a watershed model (i.e. Therefore, there is an urgent need to design effective best management practices (BMPs) to reduce upstream nutrient load and improve water quality in the Miyun reservoir. Recently, the capacity of the Miyun reservoir to supply clean drinking water is threatened by increasing eutrophication (or algae bloom), mainly due to the discharge of wastewater and excessive fertilization application in the upstream watershed. Miyun reservoir watershed is a major source of drinking water for China’s capital, Beijing, which has a population of 21.75 million.