Water Resource Engineering and Habitat Restoration

We offer wetland and stream restoration, as well as targeted designs to protect and enhance conditions for sensitive species that efficiently meet ecological needs and local, state, and federal agency requirements. Our services include design implementation, procurement support, construction management and post-construction monitoring; ensuring the future success of the individual projects according to project-specific federal monitoring requirements.

We adopt an efficient, multidisciplinary approach to solving restoration needs by focusing on options that are low-risk, low-cost, durable, and designed to achieve regulatory approval.

We have conducted more than 30 dam removal projects in nine states and one province for clients that include owners as well as public and private organizations. A complete alternatives analysis and cost-sensitive design requires access to a strong interdisciplinary mix of engineering, biology, and permitting expertise. Our  engineering expertise includes civil, geotechnical, and structural disciplines (dam stability and fish passage design); our biologists have nationally recognized expertise in fish migration and passage, fluvial geomorphology, aquatic habitat, water quality, wetlands and wildlife; and our permitting staff is experienced with NEPA, FERC, state and federal permitting requirements, has strong public outreach and stakeholder management skills, and possess excellent working relationships with regulatory and natural resource agencies, conservation groups, and other stakeholders.

Whether the decommissioning of your dam is primarily to restore fish passage or remove a structure that is no longer necessary, our team of experts has the experience and passion to work with you to make your project a success.

Click here to see the Lombard Dam Removal Project Time Lapse Video.

Our recreational design experience includes assisting federal licensees of hydropower projects to meet requirements for providing reasonable public access to project lands and waters for recreation. We assist these and other clients by assessing use and facilities and developing designs to support outdoor recreation management plans.

Our familiarity with regulatory requirements, recreational planning, and permitting allows us to assist our clients in developing new project designs in a timely, efficient manner that meet their needs and those of recreationalists. We focus on designing facilities that are safe to construct and safe to be used by recreationalists, while minimizing long-term operating and maintenance costs.

Our hydraulic engineers provide the full range of hydraulic design services for bridges and culverts.  Bridges and culverts are common road features that must be designed to withstand the hydraulic forces from a flood so they won’t cause a flood risk to the surrounding areas.  But that’s not their only purpose – they must be designed to work in concert with the aquatic environment, allowing safe migration for resident species and complimenting habitats rather than detracting from them.

We have decades of experience with the hydraulic design for bridges and culverts using Federal Highways and State DOT standards to protect surrounding areas from flooding but also to prevent erosion and scour.  Our hydraulic design engineers work in concert with our fish passage and stream restoration specialists to produce environmentally friendly designs that last.  In addition, our restoration engineers and scientists can work to incorporate additional habitat features to improve the aquatic environment. We use the latest technologies to predict flood frequencies and we simulate flood conditions using one and two-dimensional hydraulic models.  Kleinschmidt prides itself on being on the cutting edge in bridge and culvert hydraulic analysis and design and actively collaborates with the top researchers in the field to produce modern, accurate, and practical approaches.  And we pass along that knowledge to practitioners through regular training courses that cover one and two-dimensional hydraulic modeling of bridges and culverts.

We have performed hydrologic and fluvial geomorphologic investigations since 1992. Our specific hydrologic expertise includes flood frequency and flow duration analysis; dam operations modeling; hydrologic/catchment rainfall-runoff and snowmelt modeling using both commercially available and out own coded programs; GIS analysis of catchments; hydrologic flow routing; groundwater-stream interactions; and floodplain inundation frequency analysis and modeling.

In addition, our hydrologic analyses are typically focused on fish and their habitat. Our team developed a unique hydrologic model for Portland General Electric that integrated flow operations and fish mortality, tracking fish passage through a series of three dams and predicting the effects of operational flow changes on route-specific mortality rates. As part of our restoration design process, we typically collect field data and perform geomorphic assessments of bankfull flows to corroborate hydrologic analysis results. We have senior engineers who are experienced in fluvial geomorphology; they each have over 25 years of experience specifically with restoration and natural channel design and are internationally recognized as sediment transport experts. This expertise has proved crucial for successful stream restoration design in river environments with high energy and strong sediment transport rate imbalances.

In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on watershed planning in water resource management. State and federal regulators, as well as many non-governmental organizations, are actively promoting comprehensive planning and local community stewardship as alternatives to regulatory approaches.

We provide planning, engineering, and environmental services to solve land and water resource concerns within a watershed or river basin. These services include smaller assessments that focus on a particular concern, as well as larger, more comprehensive evaluations that seek to balance multiple uses such as flood control, water supply, water quality, species and habitat protection, recreation, and energy production.

Improved stormwater management is an important component of strategic initiatives for many municipalities, and many have developed Sustainable Stormwater Management Plans to counter deteriorating ecosystems. Kleinschmidt has developed green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), or source controls, which is a set of techniques that detain or retain stormwater runoff through capture and controlled release, infiltration into the ground, vegetative uptake and evapotranspiration thereby reducing the need for end-of-pipe stormwater storage and treatment systems.

Our goal is to protect and enhance watersheds by managing stormwater runoff with innovative green stormwater infrastructure, maximizing economic, social, and environmental benefits.