(excerpt from Santa Cruz Sentinel)
"This flat, arrow-straight section of San Gregorio Creek near La Honda looks perfectly healthy to the untrained eye, but biologist Jon Ambrose sees there is something amiss. The streambed is too plain -- too tidy. There are no fallen trees or logs in the water, which has slowed to a late September near-trickle. Though a lack of debris may sound like a good thing, it's disastrous for an ancient resident of these waters who recently disappeared: the coho salmon.
The species relies on the wood to create deep, cold pools of water where they can escape the heat and hide from predators...The lack of downed trees in San Gregorio and other creeks -- the result of well-meaning landowners either cleaning up or trying to prevent flooding -- is one of many reasons for the slow extirpation of the Central California Coast coho salmon. The spawning runs of these oceangoing fish helped sustain human life in the Bay Area for thousands of years, but their numbers dropped sharply with the arrival of Western settlers. Their population has since collapsed from about 56,000 in the 1960s to perhaps a few thousand today. To combat this decline, the National Marine Fisheries Service spent five years compiling an encyclopedic recovery plan for the Central Coast coho...Once abundant in streams from northern Mendocino County to Santa Cruz, the Central Coast coho was listed as endangered in 2005 and is now on the verge of extinction.
The plan, a roughly 2,000-page tome that lays out specific recommendations for 28 watersheds on the Central Coast, was released in September. Now comes the hard part: making it happen. The strategy, which would cost $1.5 billion to pull off, is purely advisory and comes with no extra funding...The status of coho in the San Mateo County creeks is especially dire, according to Ambrose. Monitoring has been spotty, he said, but Pescadero Creek is believed to have none. San Gregorio Creek hasn't had any since 2008, and the 2010 and 2011 spawning runs in Gazos Creek failed...Along San Gregorio Creek, for instance, 98 percent of the land is in private hands...One key method for improving coho habitat involves persuading landowners to use less water from local creeks or amend their water-diversion permits so they can store the water, rather than use it right away...But that can be tough sell to wary landowners..."