Healthy Rivers for Wildfire Resilience 

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. 

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.

Events

Join Us: Monday, May 18, 2026, 11 AM-12 PM MT

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

Please join us to explore “ridgetop-to-ridgetop” watershed restoration approaches on Sheep Creek (tributary to the Grande Ronde River, NE Oregon).

We’ll discuss how upland fuels reduction and forest management are paired with stream restoration techniques like floodplain reconnection, large wood placement, and beaver dam analogs to build long-term wildfire resilience while improving habitat for salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and other species.

Speakers will cover project design, implementation details, and key lessons learned. Bring your questions, ideas, and local examples to share!

Register

Past Event

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 ↓

Join the Conversation

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

Link to Forum

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

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. 

Learn More >

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.  

Learn More >

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. 

Learn More >

Past Webinar

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: 

• OPB: Scientists find surprises under surface of burned forest streams 5 years after Oregon’s Labor Day fires 
• Orvis Podcst: Wildfires and Trout with Becky Flitcroft 
• NW Fire Science Consortium: Fish and Fire: Habitat and History in the Northwest 
• Landscapes on Fire: Impacts on Uplands, Rivers, and Communities

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. 

Our Partners

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

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