The Upper Deschutes Watershed Council conducts long-term baseline and restoration effectiveness monitoring at watershed and project scales. Long-term watershed monitoring is critical to our restoration program because it provides an understanding of restoration needs, trends, and the effectiveness of restoration projects. This information is important for guiding our strategic priorities, reporting on successes and failures, and tracking changes on the landscape that affect the health of local rivers. For the past two decades, we have worked closely with a network of technical advisors to design and implement monitoring projects focused on specific areas where key questions need to be answered.

Monitoring projects are designed around key indicators of watershed health, such as water quality (e.g., temperature, pH, etc.), stream flow, fish passage, fish habitat quantity and quality, and aquatic insects (macroinvertebrates). Over the last decade, UDWC has worked with restoration practitioners to design more effective stream restoration projects that create more abundant and higher quality habitat for fish and wildlife. Alongside this effort we are working with researchers and technical experts to tailor our monitoring to provide the most useful information about the habitat and ecosystem conditions resulting from our stream restoration projects.