Healthy Rivers for Wildfire Resilience 

A Community of Practice Building Wildfire-Resilient Rivers 

An intact, lush beaver dam complex after the Bootleg Fire in the Upper Klamath Basin. Photo: Charles Erdman/Trout Unlimited

Welcome to Healthy Rivers for Wildfire Resilience, a new Community of Practice. 

For too long, aquatic restoration, pre-wildfire mitigation, and post-wildfire recovery have advanced on separate tracks. We believe it is time to bring them together, and we would love for you to join the effort. 

Latest Science:

Forest Service report released: Integrating Watershed Restoration in Wildfire Management

Read the Report

More On this Page:

Collaborate with us
Events
Science Updates
Case Studies
Webinar Recaps

Healthy rivers, floodplains and riparian corridors retain moisture, slow fire spread, reduce burn severity and may speed post-fire recovery while also delivering co-benefits for trout and salmon, water quality, and communities.

Healthy rivers facilitate strategic wildfire management by creating fire breaks and safe zones, and river restoration projects provide a beneficial use for the slash and non-merchantable timber generated during fuels management.    

Linking aquatic restoration and wildfire management can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of both. 

Outstanding work at this intersection is underway across the West, led by a wide range of practioners, scientists, managers and partnerships. In the upcoming months, we are excited to build a growing collection of collaborative resources including science summaries, practical case studies, how-to guides, trainings, and opportunities to connect with practitioners working to create healthy rivers for wildfire resilience across the West.

We hope you’ll join us!

The more voices and perspectives we have contributing, the more durable our solutions will be.

Sign up for updates and opportunities to collaborate:

Do you have questions or ideas on how to contribute? Please contact:

Warren Colyer,  National Restoration Director
Email Warren >

Helen Neville, Senior Scientist
Email Helen >

Emily Olsen, Vice President, Rocky Mountain Region
Email Emily > 

Events

wildfire site sheep creek

PAST: May 18, 2026

Healthy Rivers for Wildfire Resilience: Ridgetop-to-Ridgetop Approaches to Watershed Restoration on Sheep Creek

In this webinar, we discussed how upland fuels reduction and forest management paired with stream restoration techniques like floodplain reconnection, large wood placement, and beaver dam analogs build long-term wildfire resilience while improving habitat for salmon, steelhead, bull trout and other species on Sheep Creek, a tributary of the Grande Ronde River in Northeast Oregon.

Watch the recording below ↓

Past Event

wildfire site kinney creel

Restoring Fish Habitat in Fire-Prone Landscapes

In November 2025, Trout Unlimited hosted a webinar in partnership with The Nature Conservancy’s Salmon, Forests, and Fire Working Group about the effects of wildfire on aquatic ecosystems and best practices for restoration in the wake of wildfires.

Read the recap below ↓

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Join our forum to collaborate with other practitioners and share your work.

Science Updates

Spotlight on new science from the USDA Forest Service:“Integrating Watershed Restoration in Wildfire Management – Opportunities, Approaches, and Examples.”

“Restoring floodplains, reducing conifer encroachment, and encouraging growth of riparian species can help to connect fuel breaks, fuels treatments, and other features critical to suppression efforts, while also enhancing post- fire recovery and ecosystem resilience.”

Read the Report

Read Helen Neville’s (TU Senior Scientist) celebration of the new report:

Most of us are likely aware that, across the West, watershed health has been heavily altered by various impacts like the loss of beaver, historical grazing and agricultural practices (including stream ditching), infrastructure development, and fire suppression. The result is downcut and channelized streams that have become disconnected from their floodplains, robbing systems of complex habitats essential for fish and wildlife and, importantly, of ‘wetness.’

Vegetation has transitioned from wet-loving stream and meadow species to altered communities of plants able to persist without as much water – and that are generally far more flammable.

Though fire is a natural and important process for building healthy watersheds, these areas are now much more vulnerable to extreme, high-severity fires. Systems are burning faster, hotter, and without interruption, reaching much larger scales than before, including what are now called (100,000+ acre) “megafires.” Damage to watersheds is greater than in the past. After fires, water travels more quickly, leading to flooding, banks and hillslopes erode faster, and sediment and toxic ash get shuttled into streams. Today’s fires are also more challenging to control and pose greater risk to firefighters.

Increasingly, attention is turning to restoring watersheds both to improve the resilience of systems in the face of fire *and* as part of strategic wildfire management. As our friends at the Forest Service emphasize in this just-released whitepaper: “Water doesn’t burn.”

Expand to continue reading

When we restore stream processes and create wet meadows and riparian areas with interconnected floodplains, the water table is higher, surface water increases, soil moisture is higher and vegetation is less flammable. Healthier, more complex and mosaic-like systems provide refuge for biodiversity and increase the chance the ecosystem can resist extreme impacts of fire. By capturing sediment and ash, they facilitate post-fire habitat rehabilitation, improve water quality and reduce costs of drinking water treatment for downstream communities.

These wet habitats can also complement and strengthen fire suppression and management efforts. They provide safe areas for humans actively working on suppression and reinforce fuel breaks and linked control features (called Potential Operational Delineation, or POD, boundaries) used to contain fires or maintain intentional fire footprints during prescribed burning.

Finally, there are tremendous opportunities to link fire management activities directly to our process-based-restoration practices: using slash and unmarketable trees from thinning efforts to construct beaver dam analogs and instream structure keeps these potential fire fuels from being piled on the landscape and needing management, helps hit hazardous fuels reduction targets, solves sourcing and transport needs for restoration materials, and increases efficiency in our collective work – a true win win win win (how often do we have that?).

All of us – agencies, tribes, nonprofit organizations, community-based groups, and consultants – implementing various stream/floodplain restoration methods to restore natural processes, including low tech and relatively inexpensive techniques, are an increasing part of these solutions. And the more we can work to increase the linkage between our restoration and fire management worlds, the more we will all benefit.

See this excellent new Forest Service report, including overviews of various restoration practices, practitioner tips, useful tools for assessment and examples of fruitful case studies.

Helen Neville
Trout Unlimited Senior Scientist

Building Momentum across the West

Practitioners across the West, including Trout Unlimited, are actively developing and leading river restoration projects that build wildfire resilience and facilitate wildfire management. We’re eager to lift up and learn from these important efforts. 

The projects below are examples from Trout Unlimited’s work – and we’d love to highlight, link to, and learn from your work too. Please contact us if you’re interested in contributing a case study, project or lesson to this growing list.

Together, we can continue building momentum and demonstrating the scale of our collective efforts across the West.

Case Studies

restoration work at sheep creek after fire

Sheep Creek, Oregon

Building Ecosystem Resilience on Sheep Creek

TU and our partners restored more than 8.6 miles of streams and reconnected 101 acres of wetland habitat on a cold headwater tributary of the Grande Ronde River.

This ridgetop to ridgetop project coordinates aquatic restoration with active forest management by thinning the uplands, using the materials from the thinning project to create large wood structures and beaver dam analogs, and then moving forward with riparian planting to slow water, store moisture, reduce burn severity, create natural fire breaks, and speed post-fire watershed recovery while enhancing habitat for salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, and supporting local economies. 

fire restoration work at Thompson Burrow Meadow

Thompson Burro Meadow Restoration, Arizona 

Infrastructure Project Helps Phoenix Valley Water Supply and Arizona’s National Forests

TU and our partners restored 3.5 miles of stream and reconnected 128 acres of wet meadows in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest using over 200 wood log jam structures and riparian planting. 

In the arid and fire-prone Southwest, this project creates healthier meadows that will better withstand future fire, while also supporting post-fire recovery.  

sequoia meadow fire restoration

Sequoia Meadows Restoration, California

Precious Mettle

TU and our partners are restoring over 40 miles of headwater streams and nearly 3,000 acres of meadows in the Golden Trout Wilderness using approximately 2,500 beaver dam analog structures and riparian vegetation work.

This project builds wildfire resilience by reducing runoff, limiting erosion after fire, and creating cooler, wetter landscapes that help moderate fire behavior while improving habitat for native golden trout and other species. 

Webinar Recaps

May 2026

Ridgetop-to-Ridgetop Approaches to Watershed Restoration on Sheep Creek

In this webinar, we discussed how upland fuels reduction and forest management paired with stream restoration techniques like floodplain reconnection, large wood placement, and beaver dam analogs build long-term wildfire resilience while improving habitat for salmon, steelhead, bull trout and other species on Sheep Creek, a tributary of the Grande Ronde River in Northeast Oregon.

The presentation was led by Levi Old (Trout Unlimited) and Sarah Brandy (U.S. Forest Service).

The webinar recording is available on TU’s YouTube

November 2025

Restoring Fish Habitat in Fire-Prone Landscapes

In November 2025, Trout Unlimited hosted a webinar in partnership with The Nature Conservancy’s Salmon, Forests, and Fire Working Group about the effects of wildfire on aquatic ecosystems and best practices for restoration in the wake of wildfires.

In the webinar, three expert panelists – Dr. Ellen Wohl, Dr. Becky Flitcroft, Dr. Brooke Penaluna, and Dr. Brian Harvey – discuss the ways in which fire regimes have changed owing to human disturbance while also offering a hopeful perspective that forests, river systems, and even fish, have co-evolved with fire and are resilient, especially if appropriate conservation and restoration actions are taken in preparation for, and in response to, wildfire.

The webinar recording is available on TU’s YouTube

Further, here are a few links that our panelists mentioned during the webinar:

Discussion topics and speaker biographies:

Upland fire forest management – Dr. Brian Harvey, University of Washington

Dr. Harvey discusses the ways in which forests across North America have been altered in response to human-caused changes, how these changes have driven marked changes to forest fire regimes, and how to approach forest restoration in the wake of wildfires. On the latter, Dr. Harvey describes three primary factors that shape a forest’s response to fire: the pre-fire forest condition; the fire’s specific characteristics; and, the post-fire environment (climate, microclimates, sediment availability, etc.). Post-fire responses thus cannot be ‘one-size-fits-all’, but rather, must carefully consider the specific context.

Brian J. Harvey is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. He leads research on forest fire ecology across the western US using a combination of long-term field measurements, satellite remote sensing, and simulation modeling

Geomorphology changes to streams corridors after fire – Dr. Ellen Wohl, Colorado State University

Dr. Wohl discusses the ‘wildfire disturbance cascade’ whereby fires denude a landscape, floods then trigger debris flows on destabilized hillslopes, and rivers experience intense geomorphic change. Fortunately, when watersheds are intact (i.e. not heavily altered by humans pre-fire) they can buffer these post-fire effects by storing mobilized wood, sediment, and water on the floodplain. Thus, maintaining intact, heterogenous, and complex floodplains along mainstem rivers is a critical wildfire resilience strategy to undertake pre-fire. Post-fire, restoration should focus on headwater streams, which are likely to be heavily impacted regardless of their pre-fire conditions.

Ellen Wohl is a fluvial geomorphologist at Colorado State University. She has conducted field research on rivers around the world and her current research focuses on biophysical interactions as these influence resiliency to disturbances.

Fish responses to wildfire – Dr. Becky Flitcroft and Dr. Brooke Penaluna , U.S. Forest Service PNW Research Station

Dr. Flitcroft discusses how various fish species are more or less vulnerable to wildfire stream impacts, depending on their life histories. Spring spawning fish, for example, are less likely to be affected by wildfire than fall spawning fish. All fish native to fire-prone landscapes have, however, co-evolved with characteristic wildfire and may actually benefit in the long run from the wildfire-driven geomorphic changes to rivers. Yet, those benefits are predicated on fish being able to move and avoid short-term impacts from fire – such as high sediment fluxes, warm water, etc. – and the fragmentation of watersheds by human development is making even fire-resilient fish species more vulnerable to wildfire impacts. Conservation that limits habitat fragmentation or restores riverine connectivity will thus greatly improve fish species’ ability to respond and adapt to increasingly severe, uncharacteristic wildfires.

Becky Flitcroft is a Research Fish Biologist and Leads the Landscape and Ecosystem Management Team at the USDA Forest Service, PNW Research Station. Her research focuses on the effects of disturbance processes and river restoration on native aquatic ecosystems, with particular focus on Pacific Salmon.

Brooke Penaluna is a Research Fish Biologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service. She is the lead scientist for the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. She focuses on understanding the effects of disturbances and stressors on fish and their habitats, with a focus on Pacific trout.

The Healthy Rivers for Wildfire Resilience Community of Practice is supported by the Oak Foundation.

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