The Willamette River Total Maximum Daily Load sets limits on the hot water point sources can discharge into the river. Warm streams are a major limiting factor for salmon recovery. Rather than build expensive infrastructure to cool water, these point sources can restore riparian forest and augment in-stream flows to reduce the equivalent amount of thermal load. For Version 1.0 of the General Crediting Protocol, riparian restoration is the only eligible action. The OR Dept. of Environmental Quality’s Internal Management Directive provides guidance on other eligible actions, including floodplain restoration and constructed treatment wetlands. Shade-A-Lator is the model/metric that converts riparian vegetative structure into measures of thermal load reductions in the water.

Shade-a-Lator v. 6.2

The Shade-a-lator is model, developed by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality that calculates thermal load reductions, in kcal/day/ft, from riparian shade restoration projects. Generally, these projects are linear, extending from several hundred feet to several thousand along a stream. The assessment’s spatial unit is a stream reach whose upstream-downstream boundaries are defined by the user, and whose lateral boundaries extend outward and perpendicular to the stream to a distance also defined by the user, but typically not more than 150 feet (the usual size of recommended buffers). Within the lateral buffer, the Shade-a-lator samples one set of attributes in 100ft bands and samples dominant vegetation type at 15 foot bands, in both cases moving from the stream out through the buffer.

Water Quality: Temperature Calculation Documents
Shade-a-Lator Data Entry Instructions
Shade-a-Lator v.6.2 model