Sanctuary Forest
Sanctuary Forest's Mattole Flow Program continues to lead the way for our community and the land trust movement in the area of rural water conservation and protection of instream flows. The goal of the Mattole Flow Program is to maintain healthy instream flows for fish and people during the critical dry season. Since 2000 the Mattole watershed and many other north coast rivers have experienced a prolonged pattern of extreme low stream flows threatening the survival of endangered salmonids and the water supply of rural communities. (read more)


Welcome To Our New Partner: Friends of Small Places Targets Gravel Mining
Friends of Small Places is a local Northern CA organization concerned with impacts to rural neighborhoods and river ecosystems brought about by gravel mining and crushing, and asphalt and concrete production. Friends of Small Places (FOSP) was founded by Kristen Lark, Carlos Quilez, and Jessica Puccinelli when they realized how difficult it would be to prevail as individuals against the strong and lucrative gravel industry. (read more)


Watershed Restoration: Thirty Years of Progress
When I was asked a few weeks ago to "write up" some watershed restoration projects--how they worked, how they didn't work, problems, processes, successes, lessons--I immediately started to weigh the comparative merits of a dozen or so projects that might be good examples to evaluate. By yesterday I'd pared it down to three or so possibilities for this edition of Branching Out. But then, tossing and turning at various times during the night, my mind mulled over the broader context and approaches of "watershed restoration" rather than the myriad of details in any particular example of a current restoration or rehabilitation project. For a person involved in watershed restoration, like any number of people carrying out projects for years along the North Coast, there's a whole lot of background that gets "jumped over" by focusing judgment on a particular project. (read more)


Restoration Lessons from Ancestor Creek
Watershed and fisheries restoration is part science, part art, part engineering, and part sociology. Ancestor Creek is just one of the more than twenty tributaries to the Mattole River headwaters where Sanctuary Forest and its partners are working to restore the habitat of endangered salmon as part of the Upper Mattole Watershed Rehabilitation Project. Many of the successes and lessons learned from this project are seen in Ancestor Creek. (read more)


Seely Creek Watershed
Greetings from Seely Creek! (read more)