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Coast Range

The Coast Range's estuaries provide critical habitat for a wide variety of fish and wildlife, ranging from young salmon, crab and other marine species to marine mammals, waterfowl and shorebirds. All of Oregon's salmon stocks depend on Coast Range estuaries for habitat during critical life stages. Estuaries also provide important migrating and wintering habitat for Pacific Flyway bird populations. The Columbia River estuary supports as many as 150,000 shorebirds during the peak of spring migration, and other locations such as Bandon Marsh have recorded peak counts of more than 50,000 of a single shorebird species. The lower Columbia River supports wintering waterfowl populations that peak at more than 200,000 birds. A much smaller estuary, Tillamook Bay, records mid-winter counts of up to 20,000 waterfowl, and the Coquille Valley often hosts as many as 50,000 ducks during the winter. Diking and filling has resulted in losses of 50-80 percent of the tidal wetlands in Oregon's larger estuaries. Similar losses have occurred in the region's river valleys, where floodplain wetlands and backwater sloughs and swamps formerly provided abundant essential rearing habitat for coho salmon. The largest blocks of remaining wetland habitats in the Coast Range are found in the Columbia River estuary, on the Clatsop Plains, around Tillamook and Coos Bays, in the deflation plains of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, in the seasonally flooded agricultural lands of the Coquille Valley, and in the bottomlands along the New River south of Bandon. Major tidal wetland acquisition or restoration efforts have been undertaken in most of Oregon's major estuaries in recent years.

For more information, see the Joint Venture's plans for the Northern Oregon Coast, Southern Oregon Coast, and Lower Columbia River.