Wednesday December 18, 2024
South Seattle Emerald —
At Rainier Beach’s Be’er Sheva Park, fish ecologist Ashley Townes stands in Mapes Creek wearing a red hard hat as cranes carefully lower massive logs. From the outside, it may look perplexing — why is large wooden debris being strategically placed in the water? But for Townes, these logs are one part of a habitat restoration project she’s been working on for several years.
The beginnings of the project go back to 2019, when Townes learned that a previous restoration project from 2014 revealed and exposed buried streams of about 427 feet of Mapes Creek spanning from Kubota Gardens to Be’er Sheva Park. This project brought the stream to the surface and allowed for it to drain into the southern end of Lake Washington, and post-monitoring surveys from 2015 to 2017 found that the habitat was increasingly used by juvenile Chinook salmon.
But Townes felt there was more work to be done.