Recognizing and integrating wildlife as Elwha restoration agents

Ecosystem restoration involving large dam removal spans large spatial extents, long time scales, and diverse societal constituencies. Restoration success requires collaboration among partner organizations. Success also can be facilitated by integrating components and processes of the ecosystem itself in restoration planning and practice. We review early and future roles of wildlife in restoration of valleys flooded by Elwha dams, with implications for dam removals on other rivers. Detecting early wildlife responses depended on baseline inventories prior to dam removal, followed by monitoring during and after dam removal. Pre-removal studies revealed patterns of small and mid-sized mammal occupancy, bear movement, amphibian occupancy, and avian distributions and species composition. In the few years since dam removal, wildlife colonization of exposed reservoir beds has been rapid, dominated by early successional and mobile species. Wildlife also perform important restoration functions, and contribute to all nine attributes defining restored ecosystems. This early in Elwha restoration, conspicuous wildlife functions include native seed dispersal to restoration sites, herbivore effects on revegetation, and organic matter dispersal to nutrient-poor sediments. In future decades, diverse wildlife also will help restore terrestrial-aquatic connections by dispersing nutrients from increasing salmon runs to riparian and terrestrial areas. Each of these wildlife roles is influenced by spatial distributions of pre-dam structural legacies and structures placed during active restoration efforts, particularly large woody debris. By placing these structures in locations and configurations that support wildlife functions, restoration planning and practice more effectively integrate wildlife in restoration. Benefits include increasing the rate of restoration progress and directing it along more desirable trajectories. In this way, the collaborative interdisciplinary approach in Elwha restoration can be expanded in future restoration projects to encompass active collaboration with the ecosystem itself.