Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton approved funding for four tribal water projects during a Dec. 8 visit to the Klamath River Basin.
"Reclamation is committed to working with tribes in the Klamath River Basin on important water resource issues,” Touton said. “This funding will help facilitate collaboration with tribes as they address the severe and continuing drought impacting their lands.
“Clean water, healthy forests and fertile land made the Klamath Basin and its surrounding watershed home to Tribal communities, productive agriculture, and abundant populations of migratory birds, suckers, salmon and other fish," Haaland said in the release. "But over the past 20 years, the basin has been met with unprecedented challenges due to ongoing drought conditions and limited water supply.
“The projects we are funding, combined with millions of dollars in water and habitat resilience investments from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help restore this once abundant ecosystem for the benefit of all its inhabitants,” she added.
Reclamation's Native American Affairs Technical Assistance Program provides assistance to tribes to develop, manage and protect their water and related resources. The funding announced Dec. 8 is provided to tribes as a grant or cooperative agreement.
The projects are, Hoopa Valley Tribe, Karuk Tribe and Yurok Tribe, in collaboration with U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Juvenile Salmonid Survival and Migration Rate Study. The project will receive $3.9 million to study juvenile salmon.
The Yurok Tribe will estimate specific survival through time of wild and hatchery Chinook salmon as they migrate through the Klamath Basin under a variety environmental conditions.
The Hoopa Valley and Karuk tribes will use acoustic tags to monitor juvenile salmonid survival and migration rates from the Scott, Salmon and Trinity rivers and locations on the middle Klamath to Klamath River estuary.
The Hoopa Valley Tribe will receive $554,325 to complete an ecological flow assessment on the Trinity River. The project includes site selection, field data collection, stream gaging and water temperature monitoring.
The Klamath tribes will receive $500,000 to assess and plan river system restoration activities on the Upper Williamson River in southern Oregon. The tribe will assess the existing condition of approximately 5 miles of the river, develop plans for restoration activities, and install restoration infrastructures.
This project advances goals and objectives established in both fisheries restoration and monitoring plan and the Upper Klamath Basin Watershed action plan.
The Yurok Tribe will receive $864,533 to remove tailing piles, increase floodplain inundation, promote fluvial processes and reduce the wood storage deficit. The project also will double rearing habitat, improve the aquatic ecosystem, create seasonal surface water connections, increase vegetation biomass and increase the number of trees along the riverbanks.
This is in addition to $26 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has been allocated for Klamath Basin restoration projects, including nearly $16 million for ecosystem restoration projects in the Basin and $10 million to expand the Klamath Falls National Fish Hatchery.
