Big Thompson Watershed Coalition

Disaster recovery goal: helping our lands and community recover from flood and fire through collaboration, restoration, and resiliency building. An immediate need following catastrophic fires like the cameron peak fire is to reduce erosion on hillslopes. High severity fires burn away the majority of vegetation and topsoil on hillslopes leaving hydrophobic (water repellent) soils and burning the seed sources for future vegetation growth. Hydrophobic soils with little vegetation can be heavily impacted by even small rain events leading to severe erosion and sediment, ash, and debris flowing downhill into waterways. When our waterways are inundated with excess water, sediment, and debris, post-fire flooding occurs impacting downstream values, aquatic populations, communities, and roadways. With no seed sources to produce new tree growth, some areas may take decades or longer to become reforested. To address this need in 2024, we took a two-fold approach focusing on stream restoration and reforestation efforts. Led by our stream restoration project manager, we continued our post-fire recovery work to address restoration in streams that have high amounts of post-fire flooding, debris flows, and sediment transport. Our projects focus on installing woody structures in priority streams to slow the flow of water, catch debris and sediment, and slowly raise eroded streambeds to reconnect them with their floodplains. The in-stream projects occurred on both usfs land and private properties. We installed 89 in-stream structures and installed 500 willow stakes along riparian areas to help restore 2.1 miles of streams. All our structures installed to date have allowed 141,500 cubic feet of sediment to be deposited behind the structures (which protects water quality). To counter the lack of tree regrowth in severely burned areas of the fire, we hosted 3 volunteer days (81 volunteers and over 400 volunteer hours) to plant 1,950 ponderosa pine seedlings across 25 acres of severely burned areas of the big t watershed in 2024

Stream & water resources goal: enhancing the ecological health, function, and connectivity of our river system for human and natural communities. The river envisioning project is a stream management planning project that considers the future of the watershed and the big thompson river system through loveland. The goal is to build a shared vision for improving the big thompson river by identifying strategies and action plans that respect property and water rights, address water user needs, and enhance environmental conditions and recreational opportunities. The plan assessed the river health conditions and provided a road map for the next 20 years by prioritizing areas of the river that can benefit from river health and improvement projects. In 2024, we partnered with wildland restoration volunteers and the city of loveland to host volunteer river cleanups in loveland (15 cubic yards of trash removed, 456 volunteers, 2,325 volunteer hours) and community education on river health initiatives through a great outdoors colorado grant. We also secured additional funding to advance the planning of water infrastructure enhancements by hiring a consultant to explore project opportunities and develop conceptual designs for projects.

Education and outreach goal: providing our communities with educational events, community meetings and gatherings, and volunteer events presentations, and digital outreach to build relationships, increase awareness about watershed health and the work we do, and steward the watershed. We work to build education and outreach into all our three main programmatic areas. Under the leadership of our communications and outreach manager, we reached new audiences, continued to build relationships with our communities, updated our website and produced new educational resources. We gave 13 presentations, led or assisted with 7 outreach events, and hosted 5 volunteer projects reaching over 1,274 people. We held our fourth annual trek the thompson educational event and hosted our first donor appreciation event reaching 100 community members.