Trent Dodson has gotten of to a running start since taking over as the Executive Director of the Kenai Watershed Forum in June 2023. Under his leadership the forum in the latter half of last year leaned into several of its yearly activities and also rebooted at least one event that hasn’t happened since the pandemic.
Dodson is particularly proud of work the forum was able to accomplish in the field, which includes discovering new fish habitats and engaging the community at the same time.
“2023, I think, was a really good year for us, particularly in the field. We were able to get out and despite the weather, get out and do a lot of fish trapping,” Dodson told KSRM’s Merrill Sikorski. “We were able to trap quite a few juvenile coho salmon. And by doing that we were able to nominate over 17 miles of unknown habitat to salmon to the Anadromous Waters catalog. And all of those river miles are just within a 30 mile or 30-minute radius of our office.”
According to Dodson, identifying and opening these new spawning habitats is a significant accomplishment that will have positive impacts in the future. “We’re opening up habitat for fish to spawn and now we’re discovering habitat that those resultant fish are rearing in. And I think that’s what we’re going to see. The future is finding some of those unknown areas where there’s lots of fish rearing, and now there’s more culvert projects that we may be able to pursue that will open up. Even more rearing Habitat that we didn’t know about.”
The Kenai Watershed Forum is a local non-profit, which collaborates with other non-profits, government agencies, philanthropic foundations, and corporate entities to strengthen watersheds on the Kenai Peninsula and protect healthy habitats.
For Dodson, a big step toward accomplishing that goal is bringing members of the community into their work, kids especially, and involving them in the work of protecting Kenai waters. He says this is one of the more rewarding aspects of the forum’s work. “One thing I really love about this project is anyone can do it. And so, we bring out with us when we do these projects lots of volunteers, including kids. And so, this is a really neat project that kids love because it’s hands on. We get those traps down in those tiny little creeks that you would never expect fish to be in, and then you get to see the excitement when they pull the trap out. And there’s all kinds of little juvenile fish in there. It’s really rewarding.”
In 2023 KWF was also able to bring back the Kenai River Festival, which hasn’t been held since the pandemic, and Dodson says despite a reduced time frame the forum has worked to gear of the education aspects of the festival. “We brought it back, reduced it a little bit in scale–so a two-day event–and [are] trying to focus more on the education piece that that event really started off with. So, we’re really focusing or trying to focus it towards education, and again once again kids, and I think that’s a really key for the future of the river.”
Heading into 2024, Dodson says KWF is looking to make some big steps and has a lot of opportunities for volunteers. They welcome the public to step in and participate in the forum’s continued efforts with fish trapping, invasive species work, the volunteer based Stream Watch program, and of course education as KWF will host six “pop-up” camps for kids this coming summer.
