Session Coordinators:
Thomas H. Leroy, Pacific Watershed Associates 
Elise Ferrarese, Trout Unlimited
David Roon, Oregon State University

Riparian corridors are a crucial component of a healthy ecosystem and provide a link between upland and instream watershed processes. Riparian forests, within coastal streams of the Pacific Northwest, significantly influence the stream morphology and overall productivity of aquatic habitat which can, in turn, provide a basis for the health of salmonids throughout their range. Aquatic habitat conditions and associated riparian ecosystem functions needed by salmon and steelhead are diverse and perhaps only marginally understood, but it is clear that restoring disturbed riparian zones to conditions where they can provide multiple ecosystem services is critical to recovering threatened salmon populations resulting from past anthropogenic disturbances, including industrial logging and development. Riparian forests contribute to bio-fluvial-geomorphic processes and overall productivity of a watershed in myriad ways, including: stream bank stability, instream large wood recruitment, stream shading and temperature regulation, nutrient cycling, sediment capture and filtering, food web productivity, carbon dynamics, flood and drought attenuation, and providing floodplain dead standing and downed large wood. In this session we invite speakers to present research and case studies related to riparian forest restoration, and linkages between riparian conditions and salmonid life-cycle requirements. We encourage speakers to create presentations that allow the audience to understand the importance of characterizing existing riparian conditions, evaluating and determining desired future conditions, and developing action plans for riparian forests that allow them to reestablish fully functioning ecosystem services.