NOAA Rolls Out Penobscot River
Fish Restoration Plan
by Laurie Schreiber
Over the centuries, human activities have caused adverse impacts to the watershed. Dams, culverts, water pollution and overfishing contributed to an almost complete elimination of many sea-run, migratory, fish species and their habitat. With fewer alewife and blueback herring, important commercial species like cod and other fish, birds and mammals have lost a key food source. This also has affected tribal sustenance fishing and the historically large recreational fishery for Atlantic salmon.
ROCKPORT, ME—The Penobscot River watershed is a huge area once rich in a diversity of species.
Dams and other obstacles have wreaked havoc on fish survival over the decade. Now, the Penobscot River has been selected by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as one of 10 habitat focus areas (HFA) in the U.S., with restoration efforts expected to benefit important prey species and species harvested commercially.
Matthew Bernier a civil engineer with the NOAA Restoration Center, announced the roll-out of the plan’s implementation during a session on the topic at the recent Maine Fishermen’s Forum.
NOAA created the concept of a habitat “blueprint” a few years ago, Bernier said. The idea is to prioritize habitats based on where restoration efforts would result in the “biggest bang for the buck” for the ecosystem as a whole, given the agency’s limited resources, he said.
The goals of the HFA program are “pretty ambitious,” he said. They include restoring sustainable and abundant fish species, including threatened or endangered species, and protecting coast and marine areas and coastal communities, especially as they increasingly face climate change impacts such as sea level rise and worsening storms.
“We’re hoping that, if we have this habitat focus and focus on fish, we’ll also see positive benefits in communities,” he said. “It might be commercial fishing, tourism, recreation—public access in general.”
The Penobscot watershed was selected through a two-tiered internal and stakeholder process that, for the northeast Atlantic region from Virginia to Maine, started with 19 candidate areas. A second HFA was also designated, in the Chesapeake Bay. Throughout all NOAA regions, there are only 10 HFAs.
“In the end, it wasn’t a surprise that the Penobscot became a focus area,” said Bernier. That’s because it’s very large and has been historically frequented by an impressive diversity, in impressive abundance, of fish species. For example, studies show the system once saw 14 to 20 million returning adult alewives, up to 100,000 Atlantic salmon returning each spring, and 3 to 5 million American shad. “You can imagine what the Penobscot River must have looked like, with a lot of these species, overlapped, coming in the spring. It must have been pretty stupendous.”
NOAA has five broad goals for the Penobscot, he said.
These include restoring multiple diadromous species in the watershed, such as rainbow smelt, striped bass, river herring, and three endangered species—two types of sturgeon and Atlantic salmon.
“Tens of millions of adult alewives coming in, in the spring, means billions of juveniles going out, and feeding everything out there,” he said. “So we think if we can restore some of these abundances, we’ll be really making a dent in the prey base in the Penobscot Bay and in the entire Gulf of Maine.”
NOAA aims to increase the quantity and quality of accessible habitat in the watershed. “Accessible” means fish being able to swim unimpeded to these areas, and then being able to get back out to the ocean.
“We’re not necessarily interested in doing this by artificial means—by hatcheries and a lot of trucking and transport,” he said. “That’s what led us to a big focus on barrier removals for this area.”
Dam removals not only improve the prey base and fishery abundance; it also has indirect benefits such as improved water quality, more opportunities for watershed-based recreation, and better resiliency of coastal communities, he said.
For example, from the recreational standpoint, one unexpected benefit of two dam removals NOAA did on the lower Penobscot River was the emergence of “some fabulous rapids” in the Veazie area. That allowed the Penobscot Indian Nation to win a competitive process to host the Whitewater Open Canoe National Championship, for the first time, in 2015.
“That attracts people from all over the U.S. and the world, who will spend money on the event, on hotels and restaurants,” Bernier said. “It’s an exciting thing that nobody expected. It didn’t have anything to do with fish, but it’s a great side benefit.”
NOAA had been working on those dam removal projects before the Penobscot was selected as an HFA. The first dam removed, which was actually the second dam upstream, was the Great Works dam, removed in 2012. The Veazie dam was removed in 2013.
“We’re already seeing fishery benefits from that,” Bernier said. “The fish we expected to move upstream already have. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the alewife population increasing. We had a better Atlantic salmon return this year than we had last year. We’re documenting sturgeon going past the former Veazie dam. So, given the access, these fish really want to get to the habitat. They know where the good habitat is, and they want to get there. And if we let them, they will.”
But as ambitious as the project was, removing the dams was only the beginning, he said.
“If you look at one species in particular, the alewife, even after we removed those dams, there’s about two-thirds of their historic habitat that was still going to be inaccessible in the watershed. And that was because we still had a lot of dams, without fish passages, on the tributaries. In some cases we had culverts that blocked access to fish passage as well. So there’s a lot of work still to be done on that.”
The picture looks even more dire for Atlantic salmon, he said. So far, dam removals have opened up only about 8 percent of their habitat.
Therefore, NOAA has continued its work through smaller projects, such as fishway improvements and installations, and has forged partnserhips with other entities, such as the Nature Conservancy, Maine Sea Grant, and the Penobscot River Restoration Trust.
The strategy began with figuring out how many barriers are in the watershed. There are more than 100 dams, a lot of them hydro-electric, and more than 2,000 culverts.
Then it came down to prioritizing projects.
“We want projects meaningful to the fish, that we could actually see a response and get fish back,” he said. “If you think about culvert projects, it’s a little daunting to think where to begin.” To that end, the Nature Conservancy has developed a mapping tool to identify barriers in relation to habitat.
“So if there’s a particular barrier or dam that blocks a lot of important habitat, we can find the dam owners and talk with them about a project,” Bernier said.
NOAA will also be approaching municipalities about dams and culverts, he said.
“We’d like to work with them on dam removal, or to put in a fishway,” he said. To date, NOAA has approached the towns of Frankfort and Orland about their fishways.