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Protecting and Restoring Nooksack Treaty Water Resources

The Water Resources Program works alongside other Natural Resources programs and the Cultural Resources Department to protect and help restore the Nooksack Tribe's treaty resources. This includes monitoring and detecting change in stream temperatures and water quality, engaging in forums to coordinate monitoring efforts and protect and restore water quality, leading research into how river and streamflow will change in the future, and participating as a key partner in Stewart Mountain Community Forest and other efforts to protect forest resilience and support sustainable forestry.

Here are a few highlights from the Water Resources Program’s water quality monitoring project:

Stream Temperature Monitoring

High stream temperatures represent one of the most significant threats to salmon, in particular threatened South Fork Nooksack early chinook. In 2020, the Washington State Department of Ecology (WDOE), with support from NNR, produced a Water Quality Improvement and Implementation Plan to address high stream temperature in the South Fork Nooksack River Watershed. This document has driven much of the ongoing restoration and monitoring work conducted by NNR and partners, including the multiple engineered log jams installed throughout the South Fork.

In order to track stream temperatures throughout the Nooksack watershed, staff in the Water Resources program deploy and maintain nearly 60 sensors that collect and record stream temperatures every 30 minutes. These data are then shared with Washington State Department of Ecology and U.S. EPA for use in tracking watershed health and allocating resources.

Water Quality Monitoring

The Water Quality Monitoring Project has been ongoing since 1999. The overarching goal of the project is threefold:

To establish the baseline conditions of surface waters flowing through and onto the Nooksack Reservation and trust properties and Usual and Accustomed Grounds and Stations (aka U&A area) for water resource management specifically related to the recovery of endangered species act (ESA) listed salmon and the protection of sustainable shellfish harvest.
To use this information to evaluate regulatory compliance of waters, both quality and quantity, flowing through and onto the Reservation and trust properties.
To support the development and implementation of adaptive management actions to address water quality degradation. Data are shared with U.S. EPA on an annual basis and are available on the U.S. Water Quality Portal.

Sediment and Turbidity Monitoring

Many streams throughout the Nooksack watershed are listed as impaired for fine sediments. In addition to these listings, habitat modeling indicates that sediment load is limiting population productivity for ESA-listed spring chinook in many key tributaries. Recent data suggests that many other river segments and tributaries exhibit substantial fine sediment exceedances including the Middle Fork Nooksack River.

The hydrology and sediment dynamics of the Nooksack River basin is of great interest to many users and interest groups including members of the Nooksack Indian Tribe, Lummi Nation, agricultural, residential, and industrial users, and those agencies responsible for managing water resources within the Nooksack River basin. Recent climate trends and future climate change scenarios suggest that altered streamflow and sediment dynamics will adversely impact all of these users. Of particular interest to the Nooksack Indian Tribe is how changes in streamflow and sediment dynamics will affect survival of salmonids in the Nooksack River as well as what tools we can implement now to address these impacts.

To better understand these impacts, the Water Resources Program has installed sensors to continuously monitor turbidity in the South Fork, North Fork, and Upper Mainstem Nooksack River (Middle Fork and Lower Mainstem turbidities are monitored by USGS and WA Ecology, respectively). In addition, turbidity and sediment grab samples help to further refine our understanding of sediment movement and deposition throughout the watershed.

Streamflow Monitoring

Western Washington is usually characterized by temperate winters with an abundance of precipitation and warm summers with little precipitation; however, with increasing temperature, climate change projections forecast that wintertime precipitation will increase and fall as rain rather than snow and summertime precipitation will decrease. Winter peakflow events are forecasted to increase in magnitude and frequency. The lack of water storage as snow through the winter will result in earlier spring peak runoff and an overall smaller peak that will then be exacerbated by lack of precipitation in the summer. Decreased summer streamflow and increased air temperatures will also give rise to increased water temperatures that are lethal to fish. These forecasted trends are already being observed in the Nooksack River watershed.

The Water Resources Program monitors streamflow at a number of creeks throughout the watershed. These streamflow data are used in our efforts to model streamflow, stream temperature, and sediment dynamics to forecast the impacts of continued climate change on our water resources.