Climate change is having real and immediate consequences for the Earth and its inhabitants. Unfortunately, the Rhododendron Preserve is not immune to the effects of a warming planet. The Keta Legacy Foundation’s Preserve Committee is working to identify the impacts of climate change and to do what we can to help the Preserve adapt to a warming climate.
A focus of the Preserve Management Plan involves setting metrics and goals for the Preserve’s health, specifically for climate-related impacts. In implementing the Management Plan, we continue to take steps to monitor the health of the Preserve’s fauna and flora and plant more drought-resistant trees and plants. As a result of work by KLF’s 2025 graduate student intern, we have recently begun using the European Union’s Normalized Difference Vegetarian Index (NDVI). NDVI can be used to quantify vegetation “greenness,” helping us understand vegetation density within the Preserve and assess changes in plant health over time and space. If the data suggest that there are areas in the Preserve exhibiting vegetative stress, we can go to those locations to ground-truth the NDVI data and better understand what factors may be driving the problem such as insects, disease, drought and other factors like soil erosion from heavy rains.
KLF is also proactively ensuring that the health of Chico, Wildcat, and Lost Creeks is protected from the most serious impacts of climate change. Water temperature and clarity are critical to the health of salmon in the waterways. Climate change has already resulted in increases in water temperature in the Puget Sound region. To address this, we are creating what are called “cold water refugia” for the salmon by planting fast-growing, shade-producing trees and bushes in the riparian area of Hidden Valley. By creating these cold water refugia, migrating salmon will have a safe place to hide when water temperatures reach stress-inducing levels. The trees and bushes that we have planted in the riparian area will also help protect the creeks from erosion which can lead to salmon eggs being smothered by sediment. Of course, the threats from warmer water, sedimentation, and increased stream velocity (which can wash the salmon eggs out of the gravel) due to climate change-related changes in rain patterns can still occur in the upper reaches of our watersheds, beyond the KLF property. In the future, we hope to be able to fund outreach to landowners within the watersheds to help us take further action to address climate-related impacts on the streams.
Finally, when it comes to restoring Hidden Valley, KLF has purchased native trees and shrubs from nurseries in southern Oregon’s warmer climate. This adaptive climate change approach to planting will help us ensure these plants will survive the higher temperatures that have already begun routinely occurring.
If you would like to come take a look at our work or help with our planting work, please reach out to us at info@ketalegacy.org.
Linda Anderson-Carnahan, Secretary