City of Seattle, Seattle Public Utilities, Riparian Restoration 2001-current, Cedar River Municipal Watershed, King County, WA

The City of Seattle’s Cedar River Municipal Watershed is managed to support and supply clean drinking water to the greater Seattle area. The watershed covers 91,000 acres, hosts a rich diversity of plants, animals, and habitats, and is owned by the City of Seattle. In 2001 the City of Seattle prepared a multi-species Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) to comply with the federal Endangered Species Act and to address a variety of related natural resource issues in the Cedar River Watershed. As defined in the HCP, the riparian zone is the area adjacent to surface waters and areas of high groundwater levels where the terrestrial system both influences, and is influenced by, the aquatic system. The City’s strategies for the riparian ecosystem are designed to protect the region’s supply of high-quality drinking water, to preserve and enhance stream and riparian ecosystems within the municipal watershed, and to restore and rehabilitate stream and riparian functions. This package includes as-builts from riparian restoration projects, shapefiles of planting locations, and their associated monitoring data. The data is a result of monitoring that occurred after installation of riparian restoration projects in the Cedar River Municipal Watershed. The monitoring data includes plant survivorship but varies by project in what information was collected. The monitoring data was collected by multiple people over many years. Some projects were monitored for several years after project installation and some projects were monitored only once. Some projects included experimental plantings that were assigned a variety of treatments to test the efficacy of different planting strategies. In this instance, the monitoring data can be used to identify the success of the various strategies. Monitoring tabular data will be updated as more restoration projects are installed, and as previously installed projects receive continued monitoring.