HOULTON, Maine – The Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians will soon begin an extensive, three-year examination of the Wolastoq-St. John Watershed River with a focus of improving habitat for Atlantic salmon, Eastern brook trout and other wildlife.
Thanks to a $1,663,100 grant from the America the Beautiful Challenge, the goal is to restore hundreds of miles of habitat by assembling a portfolio of shovel-ready restoration projects under tribal leadership ensuring readiness for millions of infrastructure dollars through the coming five to 10 years.
“The Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians is a riverine tribe that strives to protect and restore the health and welfare of our ancestral homeland, the Wolastoq-St. John Watershed,” explained Sharri Venno, environmental planner for HBMI. “To that end, we are working with a collaborative of tribal, municipal, state, and US governmental, non-governmental, and private landowner partners (large and small) to engage in collective, comprehensive, and locally-led planning to identify high-priority streams for fish passage restoration in the 5 million-acre US portion of the Wolastoq-St John River in Aroostook County.”
The tribe will collaborate with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the Natural Resources Council, Maine Department of Environmental Protection, Northern Maine Development Commission and Maine Department of Transportation.
The America the Beautiful Challenge is a public-private grant program for locally-led ecosystem restoration projects that invest in watershed restoration, resilience, equitable access, workforce development, corridors and connectivity, and collaborative conservation, consistent with the America the Beautiful Initiative.
The 9-million-acre Wolastoq-St. John watershed includes five million acres in northern Maine with 11,000 miles of streams – 4,000 of which are known to be high value cold-water habitat for Eastern brook trout – and about a third of that important for sea-run Atlantic salmon and other species.
There are also nearly 4,000 road stream crossings and small dams impacting these waters, roughly 1,000 of them preventing these waters from reaching their water quality and habitat potential.
Many pose a risk to not only to hundreds of miles of habitat, but also to the safety of communities and transportation networks. The failure of road crossings and small dams has an outsized cost to these rural communities.
Led by the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, this project will create a portfolio of high priority river restoration projects that address top habitat needs, while producing safer infrastructure that is more cost effective and climate ready. A robust public-private consortium is in place to support the success of the Maliseet Tribe in developing this program in a region historically underfunded and yet with extremely high biodiversity value and simultaneously high climate risk. The project will result in a Strategic Investment Plan of shovel-ready projects packaged for rapid application to upcoming infrastructure funds.
This project will occur in the northeast edge of what is now called Maine on land and water that are traditionally the homeland of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, specifically in the Wolastoq-St.John River Watershed.
As part of the award, the tribe’s Natural Resources Department will hire a fisheries biologist to lead the restoration project as well as one or two summer technicians to assist. The grant will also allow for the purchase of a vehicle to access more remote portions of the river, as well as other fisheries equipment and supplies.
This planning effort will identify priority restoration needs and opportunities, develop teams of willing partners, and produce engineered designs with cost estimates to prepare this under-resourced part of Maine for further federal infrastructure and other restoration funds. The significant amount of high-quality habitat, large amounts of in-stream infrastructure work needed, and the lack of information, priorities, and resources for the disadvantaged communities of the Wolastoq-St. John requires a focused and flexible system of prioritization.
The goal is to agree upon a unified Strategic Investment Plan to vastly and systemically improve aquatic organism habitat and related ecosystem health while simultaneously achieving correlating public benefit outcomes including infrastructure resilience and functionality, public safety, economic opportunity, and fiscal prudence.
For additional information on the project, contact Sharri Venno, environmental planner for HBMI, at envplanner@maliseets.com.
