Close to Home: A watershed moment for Russian River

Recently, a blue-ribbon panel of river and watershed scientists unveiled a conceptual model of the Russian River Basin that put a spotlight on the need to understand the entire watershed as one integrated resource.

This public presentation of the Russian River Independent Science Review Panel provided an overview of a 700-page report synthesizing mountains of data collected on the river system, its water supply, its biodiversity and the relationships between physical and living resources.

There couldn’t have been a more appropriate place for me to land at the close of a three-day paddle from Cloverdale to Healdsburg, the second leg of the Headwaters to Ocean Descent organized by LandPaths and Russian Riverkeeper with Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore.

This expedition was launched in August to celebrate the future of the river and galvanize partnerships central to supporting and improving its health. The Pepperwood Foundation joined because of our role bringing together scientists to evaluate the role of climate change on the future of the river.

From our kayaks on the Headwaters to Ocean Descent we got up close and personal with our beautiful river and its blessings and challenges, which were articulated in scientific terms by the expert panel. We passed humming water pumps tapping into the river’s channel and banks, which the experts explained as a single interconnected water resource linking surface flows to subterranean aquifers.

We witnessed how floods can build gravel bars, sculpt the floodplain and drive bank erosion. The experts stressed the river naturally carries and pushes around millions of tons of gravel but had much greater width to accommodate this before it was manipulated for decades.

On the river we experienced increasingly clear waters moving downstream from Coyote Dam. We saw schools of fish that experts explained are found where the interaction of watershed topography and geology allows for persistent, cool flows fed by groundwater.

The conceptual model provided was not exactly groundbreaking, but rather it customized the standard stream channel classification system to describe the anatomy of our watershed. Critical to this anatomy is the relationship of the tributary streams and their headwaters to the main stem of the river.

The experts diagrammed how the capillary-like channels of our hilly headwaters - including Pepperwood’s 3,200 acres - capture rainfall and deliver it downstream to streams ranging from steep bedrock chutes to alluvial fans to the valley bottom where the main stem of the river historically roamed.

Panel chair Professor Matt Kondolf of UC Berkeley described the river today as essentially straight-jacketed by infrastructure and gravel mining intended to make it stay within a much narrower floodplain than it historically occupied.

Many linked processes shape the flow of water, sediment and life from the basin’s tallest mountains, to the valley floor, to the mouth of the Russian River at the Pacific Ocean. To sustain and heal the river that sustains the majority of Sonoma County, our efforts need to be as elegantly interconnected as the resource itself.

This is where the movement being launched by the Headwaters to Ocean Descent comes in - to intelligently integrate our community’s efforts to regenerate the river. Next steps will entail putting a spotlight on opportunities for everyone - ranging from farmers to water managers to recreationists to conservationists - to align our efforts in the context of one watershed.

The panel has recommended a slew of research and monitoring programs to improve our understanding of the Russian River. As a community, we are going to have to prioritize these recommendations based on our collective values, find funding to cover the cost and then negotiate how to translate science into informed action.

Lisa Micheli is president of the Pepperwood Foundation based in Santa Rosa.