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Home About Us Watershed Facts Projects Water Quality Education Cedar Creek Partnership Mohawk Watershed Partnership Volunteer
Goal Four of The McKenzie River Watershed Conservation Strategy is “Promote community understanding and stewardship through outreach and education.” Education and outreach are essential for providing watershed residents with the knowledge they need to understand, restore and protect the health of their watershed. The Council’s education program is targeted at local middle and high school students, is field-based and usually associated with a specific habitat restoration effort. Through cooperative partnerships with schools, private landowners and public agencies, the Council seeks to provide students with field learning activities which increase their understanding of natural processes, while providing the Council and its partners with habitat and project data that can be used to inform restoration projects.
The Council, in association with various partners, has incorporated education components into restoration efforts in the major lower McKenzie River tributaries and on the mainstem middle McKenzie River.
The Camp Creek Basin Study is a 5-year project which began in 2008. Camp Creek is about 10 miles long and flows into the McKenzie River near Springfield. The basin is a matrix of land-use patterns including public and private forest lands (85%), agricultural (13.5 %), and rural residential lands (1.5%). Students from Springfield Public Schools are examining the relationship between land-use patterns and existing watershed conditions in this basin. Various student teams are collecting water quality information, performing habitat assessments, collecting macroinvertebrates and analyzing the data. Partners include private landowners, Springfield Public Schools, Bureau of Land Management, Eugene Water & Electric Board, Springfield Utility Board and McKenzie Watershed Council.
Cedar Creek is a tributary of the lower McKenzie River and drains a watershed of approximately eleven square miles. It joins the mainstem McKenzie River in several locations near Springfield. Thurston High School students from Springfield have been collecting water quality data from Cedar Creek since the late 1990s as part of a partnership with Springfield Public Schools, Springfield Utility Board, Eugene Water & Electric Board and McKenzie Watershed Council. Also, in 2010, students from Thurston Middle School worked with Council staff to control invasive plants and reestablish native vegetation along 1,000 feet of Cedar Creek frontage on the middle school campus and neighboring Lively Park. As part of a new, long-term effort to restore flows and native fish in Cedar Creek, local students will collect information on water quality, temperature and flow.
Mohawk High School Students have been working with the Mohawk Watershed Partnership and McKenzie Watershed Council to enhance the riparian area of Cartwright Creek as it flows through the school campus in Marcola. Students have planted and maintained trees and participated in project monitoring.
The Council and the Forest Service are working together to enhance habitat for spring Chinook salmon and bull trout in eight side channels of the middle McKenzie River near Blue River. As part of this effort, students from McKenzie High School are assisting with project planning, monitoring and community outreach. Student activities are focused largely on assisting with monitoring activities including pre- and post-project stream inventory surveys, gravel quantification, snorkel and redd surveys, photo point monitoring, water quality monitoring and macroinvertebrate sampling. The education portion of this project is funded by a grant from the Governor’s Fund for the Environment administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.