San Luis Obispo Creek
Resiliency and Rewilding
SLO Creek R&R has two components:
- RESILIENCY engages community stakeholders and local residents in conversations about the problems and opportunities facing the SLO Creek watershed, as it provides freshwater habitat from Cuesta Ridge to Avila Beach.
- REWILDING examines the watershed through the lens of steelhead trout survival, because a thriving steelhead population means the ecosystem is healthy and critically important for other species of native plants and animals.
Harold Miossi’s love of the natural world and his sensibility of the need to conserve wild places has led to a grant from the Harold J. Miossi Charitable Trust to Creek Lands to carry out this ambitious plan.
Holding the line to species decline!
The SLO Creek watershed has unique factors that support an annual migration of adult steelhead to swim past golf courses, apple orchards, used car lots, an outdoor movie theater, restaurants, and spawn in clean gravel adjacent to parks and a university. These factors include an estuary that is continuously open to the Pacific allowing adult and smolt migration, perennial summer flows supporting migration and rearing, cool groundwater supporting feeding and rearing, and relatively undisturbed areas supporting spawning habitat.
We have already conducted Environmental DNA analysis that confirms the presence of Steelhead/Rainbow trout throughout the watershed. This justifies SLO Creek’s listing as a Core 1 priority stream!
We are at a tipping point in the watershed’s history—if we protect and restore the key elements supporting steelhead now, they could persist in perpetuity. If we fail, the population could blink out as has occurred in nearly every other urban watershed to the north and south of San Luis Obispo. We are literally holding the line to species decline when it comes to our local steelhead population, as the species is federally listed as threatened in SLO County and fully endangered just south of the Santa Maria River.
Action is urgently needed to implement ecological restoration of critical habitat at specific locations along SLO Creek, between the ridgetops and the estuary. Get involved and help us make the plan a reality!