The use of virtual fencing to manage cattle grazing on sagebrush rangelands has the potential to create fuel breaks needed to help fight wildfires, a recent Oregon State University and U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service study found.

Virtual fencing involves placing collars on livestock. The collars communicate with GPS and reception towers to form a virtual fence set by the rancher. Auditory stimuli emit from the collar when the livestock reach the limit of the virtual fence and they receive a benign shock if they pass the fence limit.

“We’re seeing the challenge related to wildfires that land managers, particularly on public lands, are facing in the western U.S.,” said David Bohnert, director of Oregon State’s Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns. “They just don’t have the tools to manage those public lands in a way that is timely, particularly related to wildfire. This new study should help begin to change that.”

Wildfires on sagebrush landscapes, which cover much of the interior landscape of the western U.S., have increased dramatically in recent years, with more acres burning, the size of fires increasing and more federal dollars being spent to fight fires, USDA statistics show.

These changes are in part due to the expansion of nonnative annual grasses on the sagebrush landscape, the researchers note. The increased prevalence of these nonnative grasses, which dry out earlier in the growing season and grow faster than native perennial bunchgrass, leads to an increase in fuel for wildfires.

Most methods to reduce fuel for wildfires have focused on cutting or burning shrubs or trees. Recently there have been efforts to strategically place a network of fuel breaks across sagebrush landscapes to provide space where firefighters can safely seek to contain the spread of fires.

The new study from Oregon State and Agricultural Research Service scientists, published in Rangeland Ecology & Management, looked at whether cattle grazing and virtual fencing could be an effective tool to create those fuel breaks by eating the grass that fuels fires.

Virtual fencing has been around for decades, but in recent years, with advances in satellite, battery and GPS technology, it has gained more attention in the agricultural community, Bohnert said. It allows ranchers to control livestock distribution in rangeland landscapes without physical fences, which are costly to construct and maintain and also may be harmful to wildlife.

In this study, the researchers set up a 200-meter-wide by 3-kilometer-long fuel break in a roughly 1,000-acre pasture at OSU’s Northern Great Basin Experimental Range, about 35 miles west of Burns in southeastern Oregon. The fuel break area was bounded by a series of four virtual fences, each 35 meters apart.

In June 2021, 16 cows and 23 cow/calf pairs were placed in the fuel break area with several water sources inside it. All the cows, but not the calves, were fitted with virtual fence collars that use GPS positioning to contain them in the fuel break boundaries and record their locations every five minutes. After 30 days, the cows were removed.

After that, the researchers analyzed the data. Findings included:

–The daily percentage of the cows without calves in the fuel break area was 98.5%.

–The daily percentage of cow/calf pairs in the fuel break was 80.6%. The researchers believe the difference is due to the calves not wearing collars and being more likely to walk outside the fuel break to forage. Their mothers were then apt follow.

–The cows consumed 48.5% of the grass fuels inside the fuel break and only 5.5% of the grass fuels outside the fuel break.

The findings complement a growing body of evidence that indicate virtual fencing can successfully be used for a variety of livestock management applications, said Chad Boyd, a research leader for the Agricultural Research Service in Burns who has a courtesy appointment at Oregon State.

Additional research underway by the authors is evaluating the ability of virtual fencing to keep cattle out of riparian areas to protect critical salmon and steelhead spawning habitat. They also are studying the potential to mitigate wildfire risk by identifying high fuel load areas on rangelands through remote sensing and then strategically employing virtual fencing and grazing to meet fuel management objectives.

“Grazing shouldn’t be seen in absolutes,” Boyd said. “It’s one tool that can be used along with everything else. It requires knowledge of the land management objectives, and the grazing needs to be managed appropriately. Virtual fencing helps do that in a sustainable, strategic and defensible manner that helps not only the producer and land management agency but also has beneficial impacts on society.”

The lower Columbia River below Bonneville Dam will open additional areas for recreational salmon fishing beginning Oct. 1, fishery managers from Washington and Oregon announced Wednesday.

The lower river closed to recreational fishing in early September to protect lower Columbia River “tule” Chinook salmon, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Portions of the lower river reopened in mid-September for coho and Chinook fishing.

With the vast majority of the lower river “tule” Chinook having moved out of the mainstem Columbia River into the tributaries, fishery managers with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife determined that fishing could resume throughout the lower river.

“Based on historic run timing and catch information, we’re able to reopen fishing across the lower river without exceeding our allowed impacts for ESA-listed fish,” said Ryan Lothrop, Columbia River fisheries manager with WDFW. “We continue to see coho and upriver Chinook moving upstream, so there should be some late-season mainstem opportunity for any anglers who want to brave the fall weather.”

Managers had closed all salmon fishing below Bonneville Dam on Sept. 2 after the recreational fishery exceeded its allowable impact to the ESA-listed lower Columbia River tule fall Chinook. On Sept.15, the states reopened Buoy 10 to retention of hatchery coho, and the area from Reed Island to Bonneville Dam to Chinook and hatchery coho, where impacts to lower Columbia River fall Chinook would be minimal.

In making their decision to reopen Chinook retention, fishery managers considered updated run sizes for upriver Chinook runs, catch projections, and past data which indicates the majority of lower river tule Chinook have entered the tributaries by late September. Reopening lower mainstem recreational Chinook retention will have minimal impacts on listed tule fall Chinook and will not affect planned commercial fishing seasons.

While managers don’t expect additional impacts to tules in the Columbia River mainstem, there are concerns about low numbers of those lower river Chinook that have returned to some area tributaries, particularly the Cowlitz and Washougal rivers. Washington fishery managers anticipate taking action to increase the likelihood that broodstock collection goals can be met for those rivers.

Salmon fishing will be open on the mainstem from Buoy 10 near the mouth of the Columbia to the Tongue Point/Rocky Point line with a daily adult bag limit of three salmon, only one of which may be a Chinook. Anglers must release all steelhead and salmon other than Chinook or hatchery coho.

From the Rocky Point/Tongue Point line to Bonneville Dam, the daily adult bag limit is two fish, only one of which may be a Chinook. Anglers must release all steelhead and salmon other than Chinook or hatchery coho.

Also see:

–CBB, Sept. 14, 2022, MORE RECREATIONAL FISHING OPENS UP ON LOWER COLUMBIA, INCLUDING HATCHERY COHO ANGLING AT BUOY 10 https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/more-recreational-fishing-opens-up-on-lower-columbia-including-hatchery-coho-angling-at-buoy-10/

— CBB, September 1, 2022, COLUMBIA RIVER HARVEST MANAGERS SHUT DOWN SALMON FISHING BELOW BONNEVILLE DAM; LIMIT ON ESA-LISTED LOWER RIVER FALL CHINOOK SURPASSED, HTTPS://CBBULLETIN.COM/COLUMBIA-RIVER-HARVEST-MANAGERS-SHUT-DOWN-SALMON-FISHING-BELOW-BONNEVILLE-LIMIT-ON-ESA-LISTED-LOWER-RIVER-FALL-CHINOOK-SURPASSED/

Starting Saturday, Sept. 24, anglers will be able to harvest coho salmon in the Grande Ronde River for the third time since they were reintroduced in 2017.

Coho returns to the Snake River basin have increased over the last three years with the 2021 return being the highest ever.

“The 2022 return is looking to be similar to last year,” said Kyle Bratcher, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife District Fish Biologist. “We’re excited that more folks are taking an interest in this fishery and that we can provide this opportunity.”

The Grande Ronde River is a tributary of the Snake River, 182 miles long, in northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington in the United States. It drains an area southeast of the Blue Mountains and northwest of the Wallowa Mountains.

Coho salmon were reintroduced to provide for harvest in both treaty and non-treaty fisheries and to restore ecological function lost in their absence. Coho were extirpated in the early 1900s with multiple reintroduction efforts attempted up until the 1970s. Current pilot reintroduction efforts are aimed at assessing the success of reintroduction, using a lower Columbia River stock, prior to potential development of a localized hatchery stock.

While the fishery is opening on Sept. 24, there likely will not be a lot of fish in the Grande Ronde River for another week or two. Coho are just starting to cross the Lower Granite Dam and need time to make their way upriver to the Oregon section. During the past two years, catch rates have been very low with anglers primarily targeting steelhead and catching an occasional coho.

“I suspect that because anglers are focused on steelhead, we haven’t seen great fishing for coho,” said Bratcher. “I do think that once anglers start targeting them and figure out their habits, we’ll see catch rates increase.”

This year’s fishery has been extended to include the roadless section from the Wildcat Bridge up to the mouth of the Wallowa River. With two years of fisheries in the books, managers can lean on lessons learned and have extended the fishery knowing it presents a very low risk of over harvest.  

In addition to a strong coho return, Bratcher says that fall Chinook salmon and bull trout are also encountered on an annual basis during the Grande Ronde steelhead fishery. “Having the diversity on the Grande Ronde is great and makes for a more interesting time on the water,” said Bratcher. “Anglers should brush up on species identification to stay out of trouble when harvesting steelhead and coho.”

Historically about one million coho salmon returned annually to the Columbia River and were abundant throughout the upper Columbia River and Snake River watersheds. By the 1980s, the fish were gone from the basin interior  – extirpated. But today, in several rivers above Bonneville Dam, the coho are back.

Columbia River treaty tribes, despite resistance from others in the early days, were determined to return functionally extinct coho to interior basin waters as they worked to increase return numbers for struggling chinook, sockeye and steelhead. States and Tribes are now working together to bring back coho to interior rivers.

–CBB, May 12, 2022, TRIBES DID THE “HEAVY LIFTING’ ON BRINGING ONCE EXTINCT COHO BACK TO UPPER COLUMBIA, SNAKE RIVER BASIN

By 1987 no coho were counted at Lower Granite. They wouldn’t be seen again until the first adults from the Nez Perce Tribe’s Clearwater River reintroduction came back from the ocean in 1997.

Coho were extirpated from the Grande Ronde Basin as early as 1912 due to misguided fish culture practices, excessive harvest and habitat modifications.

The combination of recent investments in habitat improvements on private lands, stronger relationships among fishery co-managers, and improvements in fish culture and monitoring provide the NPT and ODFW confidence that current efforts will result in a successful reintroduction.

The regulations for the coho fishery on the Grande Ronde River will be as follows:

Dates Open: Sept. 24 through Nov. 30, 2022, or until further notice.

Open Area: The Grande Ronde River from the Oregon-Washington border upstream to the Wallowa River confluence.

Bag Limits: For adult coho salmon (>20 inches) the bag limit will be two (2). For Jack coho salmon (≤ 20 inches) the bag limit will be five (5) with two daily limits in possession.

Also see:

–CBB, Oct. 1, 2020, GRANDE RONDE RIVER OPENS FOR COHO HARVEST FIRST TIME IN 40 YEARS; 3,000 LOSTINE RIVER COHO (RE-INTRODUCED) MAY PASS LOWER GRANITE https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/grande-ronde-river-opens-for-coho-harvest-first-time-in-40-years-3000-lostine-river-coho-re-introduced-may-pass-lower-granite/

–CBB, Nov. 20, 2020, COHO REINTRODUCTION BOOSTED BY RECORD NUMBERS HEADED FOR OREGON’S GRANDE RONDE, LOSTINE RIVER; SUPPORTS TRIBAL, SPORT FISHERIES https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/coho-reintroduction-boosted-by-record-numbers-headed-for-oregons-grande-ronde-lostine-river-supports-tribal-sport-fisheries/

Above: A map of the network of 281 acoustic receivers researchers used in this project. Each circle represents a receiver. The circles that are filled in indicated receivers where detections occurred and are scaled according to the number of fish that were detected at each receiver.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife researchers wrapped up a project this summer that could have important implications for how fishery managers design future coastal steelhead fisheries and prioritize habitat restoration projects.

Initially launched in 2021, the project used acoustic and satellite tags — traditionally used for tracking wildlife like elk and wolves — to get a glimpse into the life of coastal steelhead as they had back out to sea.

Supported through a partnership with NOAA Fisheries and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, WDFW researchers used the project to learn more about the decline of repeat spawning in coastal steelhead over the past 30 years and better understand where, when, and for how long coastal steelhead are migrating through coastal rivers.

Unlike their cousins the Pacific salmon, anadromous rainbow trout commonly known as steelhead, are capable of having offspring many times over the course of their lives. In the context of widespread declines in abundance, fisheries managers have increasingly prioritized research on steelhead iteroparity because repeat spawners typically have higher productive capacity than first-time spawners.

The study included 37 female hatchery-origin steelhead and 49 wild-origin steelhead, collected and tagged at Forks Creek Hatchery as they migrated upstream in Forks Creek, a tributary of the Willapa River. Following tagging, WDFW staff released the wild fish upstream of the hatchery so they could migrate to wild spawning grounds and released the hatchery fish downstream of the hatchery after spawning them. Prior to release, WDFW staff collected and processed scales from each fish to determine their age and natal origin.

WDFW staff and colleagues placed a network of 281 acoustic receivers throughout the project area, indicated below, to better track steelhead migration and survival.

Of the wild fish tagged, 73.5% died on the spawning grounds. Of the wild fish that survived the spawning grounds, 23.1% reached the ocean. Of the tagged hatchery fish, 13.5 hatchery fish survived to reach the ocean.

Researchers also looked at velocity, or how fast the fish moved out to the ocean, as well as how much time steelhead spent in each area of their journey out to sea. As indicated below, this analysis did show that the fish that survived to reach the ocean, called ocean migrants, spent more time in each segment than those that didn’t. This suggests that using freshwater habitats, perhaps for feeding and post-spawn recovery, is an important factor for early survival.

The research also provided evidence that steelhead out-migrate through rivers at night, a finding that builds on previous literature.

WDFW staff shared the results of this research at the American Fisheries Society Conference in Spokane in summer 2022 and will also be presenting at the Wild Trout Symposium in West Yellowstone in fall 2022.

In the future, WDFW researchers want to build on this study with a focus on movement patterns relative to changes in stream temperature.

Also see:

–CBB, August 8, 2019, REPEAT STEELHEAD SPAWNERS (KELTS): UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO STUDY LOOKS AT DIFFERENCES IN CONSECUTIVE SPAWNING VS. SKIP SPAWNERS https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/repeat-steelhead-spawners-kelts-university-of-idaho-study-looks-at-differences-in-consecutive-spawning-vs-skip-spawners/

Leadership from the Ports of Longview and Kalama, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have agreed to fund an estimated $2.1 million study that will investigate what changes or improvements engineers can make to turning basins in the Columbia River to help larger, deeper-drafting vessels, safely navigate when turning.

Currently, there are very few places on the lower Columbia River to turn large, fully loaded ships. These vessels need to be turned around before passing through Longview, Washington when Pacific Northwest storms force Columbia River Bar closures for unsafe conditions.

“It’s critical for us to ensure the Columbia River Federal Navigation Channel is reliable and safe,” said Col. Michael Helton, Portland District commander. “An additional turning basin and improvements to another in the system will provide additional safety in the lower river if the bar conditions require a vessel to change its course,” he said.

The primary benefit of improvements to the turning basins at the Ports of Kalama and Longview would be a decrease in transportation delay costs.

“Our region’s economy relies on the safe and efficient navigation of the Columbia River,” said Dan Stahl, Port of Longview chief executive officer. “Public investments in river infrastructure, such as the turning basins, ensure the Port of Longview can continue to safely move commerce to and from international markets while driving the local economy for decades to come.”

Cargo volumes have increased 17.4%, and larger, deeper-drafting vessels are making increased usage of the river system.

“The value of our partnerships with the Corps, neighboring ports and our stakeholders on the river can’t be overstated enough,” said Patrick Harbison, Port of Kalama commission president. “This important new infrastructure will assure the Port of Kalama’s continued growth, while providing system-wide improvements to navigational safety on the Columbia River.”

Corps staff are anticipating that improvements in the Longview and Kalama area would most efficiently serve the purpose with minimal environmental impacts and do so in the most congested areas of the river.

The Corps-led study will seek to improve navigation features at Kalama and Longview; however, these would only be recommendations. Congress would then need to authorize and fund.

The Columbia River is the number one U.S. export gateway for wheat and barley, the number two U.S. export gateway for corn and soy, and the number one U.S. export gateway for West Coast mineral bulk. The Columbia River system is also a national leader for wood exports and auto imports and exports.

A 2021 “Federal Legislative Agenda” from the Columbia River Steamship Operators’ Association says:

We support funding and maintenance of the critical turning basins on the Lower Columbia River. Because the Columbia River navigation channel is only 600’ wide and a Panamax vessel calling the Columbia River can be over 750’ long, the Columbia River Steamship Operators’ Association and the Columbia River Pilots who navigate our vessels rely on turning basins to safely turn around. Turning basins are necessary throughout the river system to ensure adequate area for safe maneuverability of fully laden vessels and during times of emergency.

• Establish a Federally Authorized Turning Basin at RM 77 (Kalama)

• Longview Turning Basin Maintenance

• Astoria Turning Basin Maintenance

• Albina Turning Basin Maintenance and Dredging Preparation

Also see:

–CBB, July 29, 2021, GROUP SEEKS ESA CONSULTATIONS OVER EXPANSION OF LARGE SHIP TRAFFIC IN COLUMBIA/SNAKE RIVERS; SAYS WAKE STRANDING HARMS LISTED FISH https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/groups-seeks-esa-consultations-over-expansion-of-large-ship-traffic-in-columbia-snake-rivers-says-wake-stranding-harms-listed-fish/

Wind energy continues to see strong growth, solid performance, and attractive prices in the U.S., according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Energy  and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. With levelized costs of just over $30 per megawatt-hour for newly built projects, the cost of wind is well below its grid-system, health, and climate benefits.

“Wind energy prices – particularly in the central United States, and supported by federal tax incentives – remain low even with ongoing supply chain pressures, with utilities and corporate buyers selecting wind as a low-cost option,” said Ryan Wiser, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area.

“Considering the health and climate benefits of wind energy makes the economics even better,” he added.

Key findings from DOE’s annual “Land-Based Wind Market Report” include the following:

• Wind comprises a growing share of electricity supply. U.S. wind power capacity grew at a strong pace in 2021, with 13.4 gigawatts of new capacity added representing a $20 billion investment and 32% of all U.S. capacity additions. Wind energy output rose to account for more than 9% of the entire nation’s electricity supply. At least 247 GW of wind are seeking access to the transmission system; 77 GW of this capacity are offshore wind, and 19 GW are hybrid plants that pair wind with energy storage or solar.

• Wind project performance has increased over the decades. The average capacity factor (a measure of project performance) among recently completed projects was nearly 40%, considerably higher than projects built earlier. The highest capacity factors are seen in the interior of the country.

• Turbines continue to get larger. Improved plant performance has been driven by larger turbines mounted on taller towers and featuring longer blades. In 2011, no turbines employed blades that were 115 meters in diameter or larger, but in 2021, 89% of newly installed turbines featured such rotors. Proposed projects indicate that total turbine height will continue to rise.

• Low wind turbine pricing has pushed down installed project costs over the last decade. Wind turbine prices averaged $800 to $950/kilowatt in 2021, a 5% to 10% increase from the prior year but substantially lower than in 2010. The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010, though stable in recent years. The lowest costs were found in Texas.

• Wind energy prices have risen, but remain low, around $20/MWh in the interior “wind belt” of the country. After topping out at $75/MWh for power purchase agreements executed in 2009, the national average price of wind has dropped – though supply-chain pressures have resulted in increased prices in recent years. In the interior “wind belt” of the country, recent pricing is around $20/MWh. In the West and East, prices tend to average above $30/MWh. These prices, which are possible in part due to federal tax support, fall below the projected future fuel costs of gas-fired generation.

• Wind prices are often attractive compared to wind’s grid-system market value. The value of wind energy sold in wholesale power markets is affected by the location of wind plants, their hourly output profiles, and how those characteristics correlate with real-time electricity prices and capacity markets. The market value of wind increased in 2021 and varied regionally from below $20/MWh to over $40/MWh, a range roughly consistent with recent wind energy prices.

• The average levelized cost of wind energy was $32/MWh for plants built in 2021. Levelized costs vary across time and geography, but the national average stood at $32/MWh in 2021 – down substantially historically, though consistent with the previous three years. (Cost estimates do not count the effect of federal tax incentives for wind.)

• The health and climate benefits of wind in 2021 were larger than its grid-system value, and the combination of all three far exceeds the current levelized cost of wind. Wind generation reduces power-sector emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. These reductions, in turn, provide public health and climate benefits that vary regionally, but together are economically valued at an average of over $90/MWh-wind for plants built in 2021.

Oregon State University scientists are proposing management changes on western federal lands that they say would result in more wolves and beavers and would re-establish ecological processes. They suggest reducing by 29 percent the amount of western public lands allotted annually for livestock grazing.

In a paper published today in BioScience, “Rewilding the American West,” co-lead author William Ripple and 19 other authors suggest using portions of federal lands in 11 states to establish a network based on potential habitat for the gray wolf – an apex predator able to trigger powerful, widespread ecological effects.

In those states the authors identified areas, each at least 5,000 square kilometers, of contiguous, federally managed lands containing prime wolf habitat. The states in the proposed Western Rewilding Network, which would cover nearly 500,000 square kilometers, are Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“It’s an ambitious idea, but the American West is going through an unprecedented period of converging crises including extended drought and water scarcity, extreme heat waves, massive fires and loss of biodiversity,” said Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in the OSU College of Forestry.

“Although our proposal may at first blush appear controversial or even quixotic, we believe that ultra ambitious action is required,” says the viewpoint paper. “We are in an unprecedented period of converging crises in the American West, including extended drought and water scarcity, extreme heat waves, massive fires triggered at least partly by climate change, and biodiversity loss with many threatened and endangered species. Furthermore, we note that the lands in the proposed network are already owned by the public and meat produced from all federal lands forage accounts for only approximately 2% of national meat production.”

Gray wolves were hunted to near extinction in the West but were reintroduced to parts of the northern Rocky Mountains and the Southwest starting in the 1990s through measures made possible by the Endangered Species Act.

“Still, the gray wolf’s current range in those 11 states is only about 14% of its historical range,” said co-lead author Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Forestry. “They probably once numbered in the tens of thousands, but today there might only be 3,500 wolves across the entire West.”

Beaver populations, once robust across the West, declined roughly 90% after settler colonialism and are now nonexistent in many streams, meaning ecosystem services are going unprovided, the authors say.

By felling trees and shrubs and constructing dams, beavers enrich fish habitat, increase water and sediment retention, maintain water flows during drought, improve water quality, increase carbon sequestration and generally improve habitat for riparian plant and animal species.

“Beaver restoration is a cost-effective way to repair degraded riparian areas,” said co-author Robert Beschta, professor emeritus in the OSU College of Forestry. “Riparian areas occupy less than 2% of the land in the West but provide habitat for up to 70% of wildlife species.”

Similarly, wolf restoration offers significant ecological benefits by helping to naturally control native ungulates such as elk, according to the authors. They say wolves facilitate regrowth of vegetation species such as aspen, which supports diverse plant and animal communities and is declining in the West.

The paper includes a catalogue of 92 threatened and endangered plant and animal species that have at least 10% of their ranges within the proposed Western Rewilding Network; for each species, threats from human activity were analyzed.

The authors determined the most common threat was livestock grazing, which they say can cause stream and wetland degradation, affect fire regimes and make it harder for woody species, especially willow, to regenerate.

Nationally, about 2% of meat production results from federal grazing permits, the paper notes.

“We suggest the removal of grazing on federal allotments from approximately 285,000 square kilometers within the rewilding network, representing 29% of the total 985,000 square kilometers of federal lands in the 11 western states that are annually grazed,” Beschta said. “That means we need an economically and socially just federal compensation program for those who give up their grazing permits. Rewilding will be most effective when participation concerns for all stakeholders are considered, including Indigenous people and their governments.”

In addition to Beschta, Wolf and Ripple, authors from Oregon State include J. Boone Kauffman, Beverly Law and Michael Paul Nelson. Daniel Ashe, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and now the president of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, is also a co-author.

The paper also included authors from the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, the Ohio State University, Virginia Tech, Michigan Technological University, the University of Victoria, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, the National Parks and Conservation Association, RESOLVE, the Florida Institute for Conservation Science, Public Lands Media and Wild Heritage.

———————-

Hundreds of endangered northern leopard frogs will leap back into the wild at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge in Washington’s Grant County this month.

The releases are made possible by a partnership of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife , U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Oregon Zoo, Washington State University, and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park.

WDFW collected northern leopard frog eggs earlier this spring, and after months of growing at the Oregon Zoo and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park, the frogs are almost ready for release.

WSU researchers will also fit a couple dozen of the frogs with small radio transmitters to help track the frogs’ movements and monitor their survival.  

Once abundant throughout North America, northern leopard frogs are rapidly disappearing from their native ranges in Washington, Oregon, and western Canada.

The frog has experienced range-wide declines throughout the western states and Canada. Historical occurrences are from the Columbia Plateau, Okanogan and Canadian Rocky Mountain Ecoregions. Northern leopard frogs were found throughout eastern Washington, and 17 occupied sites were recognized throughout the Columbia, Crab Creek, Pend Oreille, Snake, Spokane, and Walla Walla river drainages. T

The last known population of northern leopard frogs in Washington is located in the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area.

The species has been listed as endangered in Washington since 1999, and with only one known wild population remaining in the wild in the state, there is still a long path to recovery for the frogs.

Likely causes of the frogs’ decline in the Pacific Northwest include habitat loss and degradation, disease, non-native species, and climate change. 

“The Washington state population of northern leopard frogs has a unique genetic variation relative to the rest of the species range, and they are part of the natural diversity of amphibians of the region,” said Erica Crespi, WSU associate professor of biology. “We are working to keep them here.”

By raising eggs through tadpole stage to froglets at the Oregon Zoo and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park, the partners are working to bypass these threats through critical growth stages and establish a new population of northern leopard frogs in the region.

“Giving these frogs a headstart by raising them free of predators gives them a better chance of survival,” said Northwest Trek Zoological Curator Marc Heinzman. “We’re very pleased to participate in this critical effort to save an endangered species here in Washington.” 

“We’re at a critical point for this species,” said Jennifer Osburn Eliot, who oversees the Oregon Zoo’s frog-rearing efforts. “We’re doing everything we can to help northern leopard frogs thrive again in the Pacific Northwest — and a big, healthy froglet has a much better chance of surviving in the wild than an egg or a tadpole.”

Frogs are often overlooked for their significant contribution to the environment, a fact the agencies and their partners are working to change.

“Northern leopard frogs are an important indicator of water quality due to their permeable skin,” said Emily Grabowsky, WDFW biologist. “If we improve and conserve wetland habitat that is good for frogs, other species will also benefit ranging from other amphibians to waterfowl and deer.”

Funding for the northern leopard frog reintroduction is being provided through a competitive state wildlife grant awarded to WDFW from USFWS’s Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program and Potholes Supplemental Feed Route mitigation funds provided by Department of Ecology.

For more info see https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/species/rana-pipiens

A team of scientists concluded in a recent paper that breaching four dams in the Lower Snake River Basin in Washington provides the best and only reasonable opportunity to promote recovery of key fish species, including salmon and steelhead.

The paper, “A review of potential conservation and fisheries benefits of breaching four dams in the Lower Snake River,” published in the journal Water Biology and Security, takes a comprehensive look at current fish populations in the basin, past efforts to aid the recovery of those populations and the future impacts of climate change.

“We set out to answer the question of what should be done to maximize the likelihood of recovery of these critical fish species in the Lower Snake River Basin,” said Bob Hughes, one of the paper’s authors and associate professor in Oregon State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. “This analysis clearly showed that the aggressive action of breaching the dams is necessary.”

Dams have been built around the world to allow humans to store and alter the timing and amount of water released downstream and often to generate electricity. However, growing evidence indicates that dams also negatively affect ecosystems, said an OSU press release.

This has led to exponential growth in dam breaching over the last several decades, particularly in North America and Europe. In the United States alone, more than 1,200 dams have been breached, most in recent decades.

Breaching is viewed as a form of river rehabilitation because it can help restore river flows, water temperatures, sediment and particle transport, river and riparian ecosystems and access to upstream and downstream habitats essential for aquatic organisms to complete life cycles, said Hughes, an aquatic ecologist for more than 40 years, including the last 18 at Oregon State.

In 1960 and 1970s, the federal government built four dams on the Lower Snake River in southeastern Washington to improve navigation, produce hydropower and create recreational opportunities.

Since completion of the dams, despite considerable effort to improve habitat and provide for better passage conditions, native fish populations have been, and continue to be impaired, with many species or populations now facing extinction or extirpation, the authors of the paper note.

Nowhere is this decline more evident than in the Snake River Basin, they say. This basin once supported almost 50% of the chinook salmon and steelhead in the entire Columbia River Basin, which includes much of Oregon and Washington, almost all of Idaho and parts of Wyoming and Nevada.

Today, after decades of attempts to mitigate the effects of the dams, only 1% to 2% of historic wild salmon and steelhead numbers return and all populations in the basin face extinction or extirpation.

“The weight of evidence we’ve outlined in the paper points to a strong likelihood that breach, more so than any other measures that have been implemented in the past, will promote a real possibility of rehabilitation,” said Adam Storch, the lead author of the paper who is an analyst with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “This is a particularly important consideration given the dire state of many populations.”

The researchers examined the impact of breaching the four Lower Snake River dams – Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite – on the rehabilitation of salmon, steelhead, bull trout, white sturgeon and pacific lamprey.

For a comparison, they studied research from recent years about the Elwha River in Washington, where dams were breached and native populations of salmon, steelhead, bull trout and Pacific Lamprey have rebounded quickly.

They also looked at research that modeled fish extinction risk for Lower Snake River salmon and steelhead populations under current conditions and if dams were breached and spill over the four dams in the Lower Columbia Basin increased to aid fish passage.

And they considered climate change dynamics. The Snake River Basin currently contains 20% of the habitat occupied by salmon and steelhead in rivers of the Pacific Northwest; by 2080 it is forecast to contain 65% of the coldest, most climate-resilient stream habitats in the region that these cold-water species need.

Recent research has shown that even with the potential effects of climate change much of the habitat on the Snake River Basin will remain suitable for fishes. However, under current conditions with the dams, it is unclear how migratory fishes like salmon and steelhead will access those areas without succumbing to stress from warm water, said the press release.

All these factors led the authors of the paper to conclude the wealth of credible scientific evidence indicates clearly that breach of the four Lower Snake River dams and more spill over the Lower Columbia River dams is necessary to rehabilitate declining populations of Snake River salmon, steelhead, bull trout, white sturgeon and pacific lamprey.

“This rehabilitation would, in turn, benefit human populations that depend on these species economically, recreationally, and culturally,” they write.

In addition to his position at Oregon State, Hughes is a senior research scientist at the Amnis Opis Institute, a water resource consulting business. Other co-authors of the paper are Howard Schaller, Charles Petrosky, Robert Vadas Jr., Benjamin Clemens, Gary Sprague, Norman Mercado-Silva, Brett Roper, Michael Parsley; Edward Bowles and Jay Hesse.

Abstract:

Abundances of important and imperiled fishes of the Snake River Basin continue to decline. We assessed the rationale for breaching the four lower Snake River Basin dams to prevent complete loss of these fishes, and to maximize their likelihood of recovery. We summarize the science surrounding Sockeye Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka), Chinook Salmon (O. tshawytscha), steelhead (O. mykiss), Bull Trout (Salvelinus confluentus), White Sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus), and Pacific Lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus). From this, we drew ten conclusions: (1) development of the Columbia River System (including the Snake River Basin) has converted mainstem rivers into reservoirs, altering fish behavior and survival; (2) most populations currently record their lowest abundance; (3) the Columbia River System dams reduce productivity of diadromous fishes in the highest-quality spawning grounds that could buffer against future climate dynamics; (4) past actions have done little to reduce impacts or precipitate recovery; (5) the Columbia River System constrains survival and productivity of salmon, steelhead and Bull Trout; (6) Snake River Basin salmon and steelhead remain at high extinction risk; (7) eliminating migration impediments and improving mainstem habitats are essential for maintaining genetic diversity and improving Bull Trout persistence; (8) the lower Snake River Basin dams preclude passage of adult White Sturgeon, constraining gene flow and recruitment; (9) the lower Snake River Basin dams impede dramatically passage of adult and juvenile Pacific Lamprey, and (10) Snake River Basin Pacific Lamprey is at high risk of extirpation. Breaching the four lower Snake River Basin dams is an action likely to prevent extirpation and extinction of these fishes. Lessons from the Columbia River System can inform conservation in other impounded rivers.

Also see:

–CBB, July 15, 2022, WHITE HOUSE ISSUES REPORTS ON BASIN SALMON RECOVERY, COSTS; ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’ NOT RESTORING ESA-LISTED SALMON, STEELHEAD https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/white-house-issues-reports-on-basin-salmon-recovery-costs-business-as-usual-not-restoring-esa-listed-salmon-steelhead/

–CBB, June 30, 2021, INDEPENDENT SCIENCE PANEL REVIEWS RECENT RESEARCH ASSERTING OCEAN CONDITIONS MAIN CULPRIT IN DECLINE OF COLUMBIA BASIN SALMON, NOT DAMS https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/independent-science-panel-reviews-recent-research-asserting-ocean-conditions-main-culprit-in-decline-of-columbia-basin-salmon-not-dams/

–CBB, Nov. 12, 2020, STUDY SHOWS ALL WEST COAST CHINOOK IN DECLINE WHETHER RIVER DAMMED, UNDAMMED; CITES OCEAN CONDITIONS AS KEY CAUSE https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/study-shows-all-west-coast-chinook-in-decline-whether-river-dammed-undammed-cites-ocean-conditions-as-key-cause/

ODFW marine biologists and fishery managers continue their work to decrease whale entanglements in crabbing gear with good success. The frequency of entanglements has lessened over the last few years across the West Coast.

However, a recreational fisherman recently spotted a dead orca with crabbing gear wrapped around its tail about 25 miles off Newport.

Caren Braby, who leads ODFW’s Marine Resources Program, says it is unknown if the orca was dead prior to being entangled or died because it was entangled in the crab gear. Braby said it is also unclear in which state or what coastal area the gear was from.

The dead orca was spotted a second time near the mouth of the Coquille River, and fishermen recovered the gear. Both ODFW and Oregon State University examined and evaluated the gear.

“The gear wasn’t marked with the owner’s identity, so it is not legal gear as per Oregon regulations. In fact, the gear is not consistent with regulations in Washington or California either,” Braby said. “The recovered gear had a sport-type crab pot and was relatively unfouled, suggesting it was deployed recently.”

Recreational crab pots or rings used in the open ocean water and bays must have surface buoys for buoyancy so the gear can be retrieved. By regulation, the buoys must be marked with the owners first and last name or business name and at least one of the following: permanent address, phone number, ODFW ID number or vessel identification number. The information must be visible, legible, and permanent. This regulation does not apply to recreational crabbing from piers, jetties, or the beach where the pot is attached to shore while it is fishing.

Marked surface buoys help managers identify which fisheries and areas along the coast are associated with marine life entanglements. More importantly, proper marking of buoys and floats helps managers develop ways to prevent entanglements in the future.

See ODFW’s marine life entanglement webpage to find out more about ODFW’s efforts to reduce entanglements.

Report entangled whales or other marine animals to NOAA Fisheries’ Entanglement Reporting Hotline 1-877-SOS-WHAL (1-877-767-9425) or the U.S. Coast Guard on VHF CH-16. Photographs and videos showing entangled gear is helpful as is a general location and species if known.

NOAA Fisheries is recommending more than $95 million in funding for 19 new and continuing programs and projects to support West Coast salmon and steelhead populations, ranging from funds for efforts to reintroduce salmon and steelhead above Grand Coulee Dam, $24 million for habitat restoration in Washington and $7.2 million to Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation to “fund projects that are compatible with the Columbia Basin Collaborative sustainability goals.”

The Columbia Basin Collaborative is a relatively new organization, still organizing, intended to bring basin stakeholders together to craft effective salmon recovery efforts aimed at delisting 13 species of salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act since the 1990s. The Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation website has been hosting information about the Collaborative. (For more on the Collaborative go here. )

“We are recommending $61 million in annual appropriation funding and $34 million in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding, awarded through the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund,” says a NOAA Fisheries press release.

Below is information from NOAA Fisheries about the recipients, funding amount received, and recommended projects:

Alaska Department of Fish and Game ($5,400,000)

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Alaska Sustainable Salmon Fund will support projects necessary to maintain healthy salmon populations as well as protect and restore their habitats. Projects funded by the program includes:

Protecting water quantity and quality

Conserving land

Improving fish passage

Removing invasive species

Restoring instream habitat

Monitoring of salmon populations used for native subsistence fishing

Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association ($1,400,000)

The Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association serves as the administrative agent for the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Consortia which consists of the Association of Village Council Presidents, Tanana Chiefs Conference, and Kawerak, Inc. The Consortia will rebuild salmon populations and bring relief to resource-dependent people in the region through the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Tribal Research and Restoration Program. Information from high-priority monitoring and applied research projects will contribute to an improved understanding by management agencies of the complex relationships between salmon and their freshwater, nearshore, and marine environments. It will also improve management and recovery of declined salmon populations to better provide sustainable harvest opportunities for subsistence uses.

Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office ($24,000,000)

The Washington’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board, through the Washington Recreation and Conservation Office, will fund habitat restoration and protection projects that result in measurable benefits. They will address threats and limiting factors of salmon recovery including protecting acres of land from development, restoring rivers, estuaries, and shorelines. They will also make progress towards implementing salmon recovery plans. They anticipate funding up to 120 discrete habitat projects with PCSRF and non-federal share funding. In addition to habitat restoration projects, they will also fund and support Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission hatchery reform efforts. These efforts are a crucial component to salmon recovery and support the exercise of tribal treaty fishing rights. Finally, they will conduct status and trends monitoring, validation monitoring, and statewide project effectiveness monitoring to track progress and fish response at a watershed scale.

The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission ($5,500,000)

The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission is a support organization to 20 Puget Sound and Washington coastal treaty tribes. They will administer tribal sub-awards to support activities that:

Address factors limiting the viability of Endangered Species Act-listed salmon and steelhead

Restore and protect habitats

Conduct essential monitoring

Conduct projects that will promote a meaningful expression of tribal treaty fishing rights and advance the recovery and conservation of salmon and steelhead

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation ($393,688)

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation will implement studies of salmon reintroduction upstream of Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee Dams in the Upper Columbia Basin. The project will support the overall effort to implement Phase 2 feasibility evaluations of trapping and transporting adult salmon to the blocked area of the Upper Columbia basin. They will also assist in the restoration of native subsistence fishing in an area deprived of salmon for 80 years. This grant also supports U.S. efforts to support healthy Pacific salmon populations through modernization of the Columbia River Treaty regime.

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe ($697,000)

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe will implement Phase 4 of the Cispus-Yellowjacket Restoration project. It will alter physical habitat conditions to form a resilient, forested floodplain. It will also and increase habitat complexity, resulting in a higher quantity and quality of holding, spawning, and rearing habitat for juvenile and adult Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead in the Lower Columbia basin.

Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation ($7,250,000)

The Idaho Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Program, administered by the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation, will fund projects that are compatible with the Columbia Basin Collaborative sustainability goals. These include enhancing the availability and quality of salmon habitats, improve management practices, and address major habitat limiting factors. The vision for the Idaho Program is to have delisted Snake River salmon and steelhead stocks that indicate clean and abundant water, reliable and clean energy, a robust economy, and vibrant cultural and spiritual traditions, all of which exist within sustainable ecosystems.

Coeur d’Alene Tribe ($522,329)

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe will gather baseline data to inform the full-scale feasibility of salmon reintroductions upstream of Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams by studying the downstream movement and survival of juvenile Chinook salmon. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe is a new PCSRF grant recipient. This grant also supports U.S. efforts to support healthy Pacific salmon populations through modernization of the Columbia River Treaty regime.

Shoshone Bannock Tribes ($40,000)

The Shoshone Bannock Tribes Cultural and Subsistence Fishery Monitoring and Management Program will use funds to participate in fishery forecasting and in-season management of tribal fisheries on Snake River spring/summer Chinook salmon.

Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board ($18,700,000)

The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board will fund projects that help achieve salmon recovery goals across the state of Oregon by distributing funding to high-priority salmon recovery actions. They will also provide funding to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support several of their salmon recovery programs that are integral to the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds and that align with Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund program goals

Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission ($4,075,000)

The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission is a support organization to the four Columbia River treaty tribes. They will administer sub-awards to its member tribes based on high-priority needs for salmon in tribal-ceded areas. Funded projects include all aspects of salmon recovery including planning and design, implementation, monitoring, and research.

Coquille Indian Tribe ($2,217,515)

The Coquille Indian Tribe will replace the Coaledo Tide Gate on Beaver Slough of the Coquille River. This will result in fish access to 490 acres of tidal wetlands for over-winter rearing coho salmon. This project will provide necessary upgraded infrastructure to provide access and manage water levels allowing for the restoration of this tidally influenced area, increase access to habitat, and enhance the ecological function of this off-channel habitat.

Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians ($681,803)

The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians will implement Phase 3 of the Rogue River Ranch Side Channel Restoration Project. This project takes a multi-pronged approach to improving coho salmon critical habitat by:

Halting bank erosion to prevent fine sediment delivery to the stream

Restoring native vegetation in the riparian areas

Increasing stream complexity and side channel rearing habitat

Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians ($3,800,000)

The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians will implement the multi-phased Waite Ranch Tidal Wetland Restoration Project. This phase of the project will contribute to filling more than 8,000 linear feet of agricultural drainage channels, removing 7,000 feet of existing fencing, and restoring 2,000 feet of tidal channels within the Siuslaw River estuary.

Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians ($498,715)

The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians will implement Phase 3 of the Siletz River Restoration project constructing large wood structures located on 1.5 miles of the lower Siletz River. This is the Tribe’s first efforts to install large wood structures in a tidal zone. The addition of large wood structures will result in more habitat complexity that increases the availability and quality of habitat for Oregon Coast coho salmon.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife ($16,838,993)

The Fisheries Restoration Grant Program, through the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, will fund salmon and steelhead projects throughout the state of California. The funding will focus on large-scale, process-based habitat restoration projects that create self-sustaining natural ecosystem functions and processes. Objectives include the improvement of spawning success of adult salmon and steelhead, and increased the health and survival of all life stages of salmon and steelhead.

Klamath River Inter-Tribal Fish and Water Commission ($1,400,000)

The Klamath River Inter-Tribal Fish and Water Commission is a support organization to four federally recognized tribes in the Klamath Basin. They will administer sub-awards to its member tribes to conduct habitat restoration activities, monitoring, and research.

Tolowa Dee-ni Nation ($1,963,950)

The Tolowa Dee-ni Nation will remove and replace the Rowdy Creek Fish Hatchery diversion weir to restore fish passage to 13.1 stream miles, the highest priority barrier for removal on the state’s Fish Passage Priorities List. Tolowa Dee-ni Nation is a new PCSRF grant recipient.

The Wiyot Tribe ($150,000)

The Wiyot Tribe will build tribal capacity to conduct fisheries research, monitoring, and future restoration projects along the Eel River. The project outcomes are to reestablish the Tribe’s role as stewards of their ancestral territory by engaging with restoration partners and developing future restoration projects.

The Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund is a competitive grant program that distributes funds to states and tribes. Eligible projects include:

All phases of habitat restoration and protection activities that contribute to recovering Pacific salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act

Projects that support Pacific salmon and steelhead species important to tribal treaty and trust fishing rights and native subsistence fishing.

Since the program’s inception in 2000, it has provided more than $1.6 billion to implement more than 15,000 salmon recovery projects. NOAA says recipients have “protected, restored, and created nearly 1.2 million acres of salmon habitat and have opened 11,000 stream miles to salmon and steelhead.”

Idaho Fish and Game staff have confirmed three separate incidents of bears attacking and killing livestock in the Panhandle’s Bonner and Boundary counties.

The first incident occurred on June 24 and was reported to Fish and Game on June 27. A pig was killed by a confirmed grizzly bear near Good Grief in Boundary County, just south of the Canadian border. In response to the incident, a Fish and Game Conservation Officer along with USDA Wildlife Services staff investigated the scene, provided the landowner with electric fencing to secure remaining livestock and set traps on the property to try and capture the bear.

The second and third incidents occurred near Elmira in Bonner County. A domestic pig was killed by a confirmed grizzly bear on June 28. On the evening of June 29, four goats were killed by a bear on a nearby property. Further investigation could not confirm the species of the bear responsible for the goats’ deaths, but given the close proximity to the previous attack, it is likely the same grizzly bear.

In response to the incidents, Fish and Game Conservation Officers and USDA Wildlife Services staff provided the landowners with electric fencing to secure remaining livestock and set multiple traps in an attempt to capture the bear.

If grizzly bears are successfully trapped at the location of any of the incidents, staff will check for lip tattoos and ear tags to determine whether or not the bears have been encountered before or if they are previously undocumented animals.

In addition, if bears are captured, US Fish and Wildlife staff along with Fish and Game will collect biological data including DNA, measurements, sex and age. If bears are relocated, a GPS collar will be placed on them for future tracking of their movements and behaviors.

Two Fish and Game employees are largely dedicated to grizzly bear management and education in the Panhandle Region. The first is a Grizzly Bear Enforcement and Education Senior Conservation Officer, and the second is a seasonal Grizzly Bear Management and Education Biologist.

The positions exist to respond to grizzly bear-human conflicts, work with landowners to prevent future bear conflicts and provide bear education and outreach. Both positions are based out of Boundary County, and as part of their program, supplies and support can be provided to the public for grizzly bear-human conflicts.

Landowners can request assistance with and a variety of educational materials for “living in bear country” by contacting the Panhandle Regional office at (208) 769-1414. We encourage the public to take advantage of the resources we have available to help. In addition, cost-sharing programs through other entities exist for reducing human-bear conflicts.

There are some simple steps homeowners and landowners can take to make their properties less attractive to bears and reduce the likelihood of potential problems.

Electric fences are the most effective deterrent for grizzly bears. If you have livestock, secure them overnight in a barn, or corral them in an electrified fence.

Properly dispose of attractants, including trash, animal carcasses, compost, livestock feed and beehives.

Securely store food, garbage and other attractants in a bear-resistant place.

Keep pet food secured as you do your own. Bears like pet food as much as your pet does.

Avoid filling bird feeders until wintertime.

Do not bury or throw garbage into the nearby woods.

Make sure to clean your grills and keep them in a building, if possible.

In addition, here are a few tips in the event you do encounter a bear:

Never approach bears, always stay at least 300 feet away.

Do not interrupt bear activities.

Never feed bears.

Carry bear spray and know how to use it.

Never run if you encounter a bear.

Know the difference between a defensive encounter and a predatory encounter and how to respond in each situation. Check out this helpful video for details.

At a signing ceremony on Saturday, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and the five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission formalized and celebrated their partnership for co-management of the Bears Ears National Monument.

After signing the cooperative agreement formally recognizing their working relationship, the parties travelled to Highway 261 to unveil the Bears Ears National Monument sign, which includes insignias of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.

“We are so pleased to celebrate this unique partnership between Tribal Nations and federal agencies to manage and protect the remarkable and sacred Bears Ears landscape,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning. “This is an important step as we move forward together to ensure that Tribal expertise and traditional perspectives remain at the forefront of our joint decision-making for the Bears Ears National Monument. This type of true co-management will serve as a model for our work to honor the nation-to-nation relationship in the future.”

“It’s an honor for the Department of Agriculture to sign this one-of-a-kind cooperative agreement,” said USDA’s Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Homer Wilkes. “This agreement outlines a common vision for management of Bear Ears National Monument and protection of these sacred lands that are important to so many.”

“Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for a resilient future. We are being asked to apply our traditional knowledge to both the natural and human-caused ecological challenges, drought, erosion, visitation, etc.,” said Bears Ears Commission Co-Chair and Lieutenant Governor of Zuni Pueblo Carleton Bowekaty. “What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving Tribes the opportunity to participate in the management of lands their ancestors were removed from?” 

To support the work that the five Tribes will perform under this agreement and through their representatives on the Bears Ears Commission, the BLM and U.S. Forest Service also announced that they will provide resources to each Tribe through a separate process.

On October 8, 2021, President Biden issued Proclamation 10285, which restored the Bears Ears National Monument, and recognized the importance of knowledge of Tribal Nations in managing the monument by re-constituting the Bears Ears Commission as established by President Obama in 2016, consisting of one elected officer each from the five Tribes.

The BLM and the U.S. Forest Service jointly manage the monument and will prepare a management plan for federal lands within the 1.36 million-acre boundaries of the Bears Ears National Monument working cooperatively with the Tribal members of the Bears Ears Commission to protect and restore the monument objects and values.

Bears Ears National Monument has a rich cultural heritage and is sacred to many Native American Tribes who rely on these lands for traditional and ceremonial uses. There are also world-class opportunities for scenic driving, photography, rock climbing, hiking, biking, camping, paleontological exploration, and wildlife viewing. Learn more at https://www.blm.gov/programs/national-conservation-lands/utah/bears-ears-national-monument

The agreement says:

“The Tribal Nations that make up the Bears Ears Commission and the Federal agencies that are charged with administration of the monument each serve important roles in the planning, management, conservation, restoration, and protection of the sacred lands within the Bears Ears monument, as well as in the protection of ceremonies, rituals, and traditional uses that are part of the Tribal Nations’ way of life on these lands since time immemorial. Tribal Nations, and particularly Tribal Elders, have important knowledge, local expertise, and an understanding of the spiritual significance of the Bears Ears region beyond the physical environment and is critical to inform the BLM and USFS planning processes and management of monument objects. As described in Proclamation 10285, the Bears Ears is both a cultural living space for Tribal members- holding the history of their traditions and cultural practices- and a location that is integral to their ceremonial practices and cultural traditions, as well as other activities and rituals. The Bears Ears is a living landscape that provides opportunities for Elders to convey to younger generations the stories, traditions, and practices of their people; to help them understand where they came from, who they are, and how to live. The landscape has been continually used by members of Tribal Nations since time immemorial to heal, practice their spirituality, pray, rejuvenate, and connect with their history. This agreement will serve, in part, to facilitate communication and understanding between the Tribal Nations and the Federal land managers to better protect ceremonial and traditional activities within the monument, as well as to preserve and integrate traditional knowledge of the region and apply that knowledge to inform Federal land management decisions.

“This Cooperative Agreement is made and entered into between the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni to implement the direction in the Proclamation that requires the BLM and USFS to obtain input from the Commission into the development and implementation ofthe monument management plan.

“Further, the purpose of this Cooperative Agreement is to facilitate coordination and cooperative management of the Federal lands within the Bears Ears, for purposes of implementing the Proclamation and to provide consistent, effective, and collaborative management of the lands and resources.”

The Department of the Interior today transferred fish production at Dworshak National Fish Hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe, which the agency says is “an important move underscoring the Biden Administration’s commitment to empowering Indigenous communities and supporting Tribal trust responsibility.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland joined leadership from the Nez Perce Tribe, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tour the hatchery and commemorate the transfer. The fish produced at the hatchery serve help to meet the United States’ trust responsibility for protecting the resources reserved in the treaties between the Nez Perce Tribe and the United States.

“The transfer of fish production at the Dworshak National Fish Hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe is a triumph that is nearly 20 years in the making, and a testament to what can happen when we work collaboratively,” said Haaland. “There is much to be gained when we respect and integrate Indigenous knowledge into our conservation initiatives. Today’s event commemorates Native people’s resilience, conservation efforts guided by Indigenous knowledge, and the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to honor our trust responsibility and treaty obligations to Tribes.” 

The Dworshak hatchery, located in the heart of the Nez Perce Reservation in Orofino, Idaho, has been jointly managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Nez Perce Tribe since 2005. The Service will continue its partnership with the Nez Perce Tribe by continuing to provide support to the hatchery through the Idaho Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office and Pacific Region Fish Health Program.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s wildlife management and conservation efforts are strengthened when we incorporate Indigenous knowledge and rely on the best available science,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams. “I am proud of the work the Service has done to manage the fish production at this hatchery jointly with the Tribe – and I look forward to its continued success as we work to ensure that the fish hatchery and surrounding community continue to thrive together.”

The hatchery is located at the confluence of the North Fork and mainstem Clearwater River, 3 miles west of Orofino. The hatchery was constructed by the Corps in the late 1960’s to mitigate for the loss of steelhead in the North Fork of the Clearwater River and its tributaries as a result of the construction of Dworshak Dam. The Corps will continue to own the facility.

The hatchery has been co-managed by USFWS and the Nez Perce as a result of the Snake River Basin Adjudication settlement agreement. The Service and Tribe have maintained existing production goals for steelhead trout, Chinook salmon, and coho salmon and continue working together to enhance fishery resources of the Clearwater River Basin.

The hatchery produces 2.1 million steelhead, 2.55 million spring Chinook, and 500,000 coho salmon annually. These are all anadromous fish, meaning they make a 550-mile journey down the Snake and Columbia rivers as juveniles to the Pacific Ocean, then return as adults to spawn.

Steelhead and salmon have and continue to play a key role in the cultural past of the Native communities that once lived in or near the Clearwater River basin. The fish produced provide harvest opportunities for the shared Tribal and non-Tribal fisheries in the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia Rivers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

The Nez Perce people, also known as the Nimiipuu, lived and thrived in this region since time immemorial. The town of Ahsahka, next to the Dworshak hatchery, was once the site of the largest inland fishing village for Native Americans throughout the Pacific Northwest. Each season, Tribes would gather on this site and harvest from the abundant North Fork runs of Chinook and steelhead.

The hatchery produces large B-steelhead trout to mitigate for habitat lost in the North Fork Clearwater River due to the construction of Dworshak Dam, and produces spring Chinook salmon to mitigate for lost habitat due to construction of the four federal lower Snake River dams. The Nez Perce Tribe is also rebuilding coho salmon runs in the Clearwater River Basin through the Coho Restoration Program at the hatchery.

In the winter, Chinook and coho eggs hatch and develop in the darkness of incubation trays. Hatchery employees use the winter months to prepare the nursery for the busy spring. Steelhead trapping continues and adults are spawned.

In the spring, Chinook and steelhead smolts are released. New Chinook and coho fry are ponded into raceways. New steelhead juveniles move into the nursery from incubators and then to outside Burrows ponds. Steelhead spawning continues.

In the summer, adult Chinook trapping is followed by spawning. Juvenile fish continue growing outside.  Adipose fin clipping and coded-wire tagging occurs.

In the fall, coho are trapped and spawned. Steelhead trapping begins as well.  Spring Chinook eggs are kept on chilled water to ensure they develop in tune with their natural cycle.

The famous Clearwater “B” strain of steelhead trout return to the hatchery from the Pacific Ocean, more than 500 miles away, from October until May, and are spawned from January through April.

Chinook salmon return from May to August, and are spawned from late August to early September.

Adult coho salmon return from October thru late November, with spawning occurring during that time.

By Martin Koenig, Idaho Fish and Game Natural Resource Program Coordinator

Last summer was particularly dry and hot in much of Idaho, renewing concerns among some trout anglers about fishing when water temperatures climb. Anglers are often concerned that maybe they shouldn’t be fishing on the hottest days for fear that they might be reducing trout populations, but a recent study on Idaho rivers during a hot summer showed catch-and-release angling did not harm the trout population.

Higher stream temperatures have become more common in recent years, leading anglers to ask two common questions. First, is catch-and-release fishing actually causing harm to trout populations by fishing on summer days when water temperatures get warm? Secondly, should Fish and Game use “hoot owl” fishing closures to prohibit even catch-and-release fishing when water temperatures get too warm? Last summer, Idaho Fish and Game biologists performed a study to help answer these questions. Biologists also provide a real-world example to put this in perspective of actual trout populations.

HOW THE STUDY WORKED

The study included four streams in eastern Idaho, where anglers caught dozens of trout ranging from 7 to 15 inches, on days where water temperatures ranged from 56 to 78°F. Biologists marked each landed trout with a small external tag, recorded the water temperature when it was caught, and then released it back into the stream. 

Anglers kept careful track of how long they fished, and how many trout they caught, so they could estimate a “catch rate” (or, how good the fishing is). A few weeks later, biologists returned and surveyed the trout population with electrofishing gear to look for the tagged trout. Using the tags from recaptured trout, biologists could see if water temperature at the time the fish were landed had affected which trout survived and which ones didn’t.

The study found that mortality was 69% higher for trout landed at 73°F water temperatures than for those landed when waters were less than 66°F. These results suggest that higher water temperatures were indeed decreasing the survival of caught-and-released trout. However, catch rates were much lower (77% lower!) at the higher water temperatures above 73°F, and much better when temperatures were below 66°F.

So while mortality was higher at the hottest temperatures, the number of trout caught was much lower because it was much harder to catch fish at those warmer temperatures. This phenomenon is well known to trout anglers, who often stop fishing in the heat of the day because catch rates are poor compared to cooler times of the day.

A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

Conditions for trout in the Big Wood River were tough during the summer of 2021. It started off with a low snowpack, and the weather got hot quickly in the spring, and stayed that way all summer. River flows peaked early and stayed low throughout much of the year. Fish and Game monitors the trout population here on a 3-year rotation in the fall. There were no “hoot owl” fishing restrictions in place during 2021, so the population surveys that fall offered a chance to see how the trout population was looking after a season of fishing during the long, hot summer. In addition, information reported by anglers catching tagged fish could be helpful to know how many fish in the population are typically caught.

In fall 2021, Fish and Game staff surveyed the trout (and whitefish) population of the Big Wood River. This was done using electrofishing gear and mark-recapture calculations to estimate the total number of trout in the river.

One way biologists estimate the number of trout caught by anglers is to tag them, then release them back into the river. In 2014, Fish and Game biologists tagged 159 trout throughout the Big Wood River. In the three years after being tagged, a total of 14% of those trout had been caught (and none were reported as being kept). Dividing that up evenly across the 3 years, the average annual encounter rate (amount of fish caught by anglers) is only about 5% per year.

Now let’s do a little basic math to estimate the impact of catch-and-release fishing on the population. The most recent population survey estimated the Hailey section of the Big Wood River had approximately 2,422 trout. While the tags reported 14% of trout were caught over the three years (encounter rate), let’s just assume they were all caught in the first year just to be cautious.

If anglers caught and released 14% of the Hailey reach trout population that would be about 340 trout.

(2,422 trout) x (14% encounter rate) = 340 trout caught

Of those caught and released, other studies typically suggest a 5% mortality rate. But let’s assume conditions were stressful and that 20% of the released trout died, which would be 68 trout that did not survive.

(340 trout caught) x (20% mortality) = 68 dead trout

Those 68 trout that died from catch-and-release fishing would make up about 2.8% of the total population.

(68 trout) ÷ (2,422 total Hailey reach trout) = 2.8% of the population

In the Big Wood River, the normal yearly mortality of trout is between 50-70%! So when we put that into perspective, catch-and-release fishing is having very little impact, even if we assume 20% of those caught trout died after being released, which biologists estimate is more like 5% actually. Even if the encounter rate was 50%, we still would only impact 10% of the trout population.

Despite the hot, dry summer, the fall 2021 population survey on the Big Wood River found the trout population is healthy. It doesn’t look like normal fishing activity during summer of 2021 had any impact on the overall trout population.

Most of the time, conditions during the winter are the real drivers of trout population changes. Low water flows and extremely cold temperatures can combine to make tough conditions for trout to survive in winters. Last year’s drought conditions meant low winter flows, so despite the stability of trout populations leading up to winter, we could see lower trout numbers coming into the 2022 fishing season, but time will tell.

WHAT IT MEANS

Trout anglers cause some low amount of fishing mortality regardless of the water temperature. However, while mortality of individual trout goes up at higher water temperatures, angler catch success goes down at the same time. Because catch rates drop as the water temperatures climb, anglers are causing as much fishing mortality at lower water temperatures as they are at higher water temperatures because they just catch fewer trout.

It goes without saying that warm water and wild trout do not go well together. Trout need cold, clean, well-oxygenated water to thrive. Droughts and hot summers have become more common lately, and biologists also consider the added stress trout face by living in warmer water. Stress is nothing new to trout, which are adapted to deal with stresses like being chased by predators like cormorants and river otters, or dealing with extreme flood waters in the spring. However, we need to keep in mind that trout populations are very resilient. After stressful events such as floods or drought, trout populations can rebound quickly when conditions are good.

Despite mortality of individual trout, studies show catch-and-release angling works well to recover overfished populations or conserve vulnerable populations. This is why Idaho Fish and Game is hesitant to close fishing in wild trout waters based on warm water temperatures. Keep in mind, water temperatures in trout streams above 73°F are rare.

We studied summer water temperature data for Idaho’s most prominent wild trout fisheries. In the last several years, temperatures exceeding 73°F are extremely rare, occurring in only about 1% of the 300,000+ hours of data we gathered. So in the vast majority of Idaho’s wild trout stream fisheries, they rarely see extremely warm water temperatures in the first place. On those occasions where trout streams do get above 73°F, anglers may want to pause fishing because catch rates are noticeably lower, but not because they are worried about harming the trout population.

This story was originally published by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting and is reprinted with permission.

By Tony Schick (OPB) and Irena Hwang (ProPublica)

The U.S. government promised Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest that they could keep fishing as they’d always done. But instead of preserving wild salmon, it propped up a failing system of hatcheries. Now, that system is falling apart.

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The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine.

Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant.

The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.

The Carson National Fish Hatchery was among the first hatcheries funded by Congress over 80 years ago to be part of the salvation of salmon, facilities created specifically to replace the vast numbers of wild salmon killed by the building of dozens of hydroelectric dams along the Northwest’s mightiest river, the Columbia. Tucked beside a river in the woods about 60 miles northeast of Portland, Carson has 50 tanks and ponds surrounded by chain-link fencing. They sit among wood-frame fish nursery buildings and a half-dozen cottages built for hatchery workers in the 1930s.

Today, there are hundreds of hatcheries in the Northwest run by federal, state and tribal governments, employing thousands and welcoming the community with visitor centers and gift shops. The fish they send to the Pacific Ocean have allowed restaurants and grocery seafood counters to offer “wild-caught” Chinook salmon even as the fish became endangered.

The hatcheries were supposed to stop the decline of salmon. They haven’t. The numbers of each of the six salmon species native to the Columbia basin have dropped to a fraction of what they once were, and 13 distinct populations are now considered threatened or endangered. Nearly 250 million young salmon, most of them from hatcheries, head to the ocean each year — roughly three times as many as before any dams were built. But the return rate today is less than one-fifth of what it was decades ago. Out of the million salmon eggs fertilized at Carson, only a few thousand will survive their journey to the ocean and return upriver as adults, where they can provide food and income for fishermen or give birth to a new generation.

Federal officials have propped up aging hatcheries despite their known failures, pouring more than $2.2 billion over the past 20 years into keeping them going instead of investing in new hatcheries and habitat restorations that could sustain salmon for the long term. At the largest cluster of federally subsidized hatcheries on the Columbia, the government spends between $250 and $650 for every salmon that returns to the river. So few fish survive that the network of hatcheries responsible for 80% of all the salmon in the Columbia River is at risk of collapse, unable to keep producing fish at meaningful levels, an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica has found.

Related: About the data: How we analyzed salmon and steelhead survival

These failures are all the more important because hatcheries represent the U.S. government’s best effort to fulfill a promise to the Northwest’s Indigenous people. The government and tribes signed treaties in the 1850s promising that the tribes’ access to salmon, and their way of life, would be preserved. Those treaties enshrined their right to fish in their “usual and accustomed places.” The pacts between sovereign nations did not stop the U.S. from moving forward with a massive decades-long construction project in the middle of the 20th century: the building of 18 dams that transformed a free-flowing river into a machine of irrigation, shipping and hydroelectric power.

The dams meet nearly 40% of today’s regional electricity needs. But they decimated wild salmon.

Many species of salmon are at or near their lowest numbers on record. Native fishermen say their way of life has been stolen from them and from future generations. But the government didn’t invest in making hatcheries better equipped to grow more resilient and abundant stocks. Instead, officials ushered in endangered species restrictions. They knew that hatchery fish were genetically weaker than wild salmon, so they put limits on the number of hatchery fish that could be released into rivers, where they might spawn with wild fish and weaken the gene pool. These restrictions hampered the productivity of the hatcheries, squeezing tribal fishing even more.

In recent years, salmon survival has dropped to some of the worst rates on record. The numbers of returning adult salmon have been so low that dozens of hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.

Each passing year of poor returns worsens the outlook for salmon. While salmon runs fluctuate from year to year and this year’s returns have been higher than those of the past few years, human-caused climate change continues to warm the ocean and rivers, and the failure to improve salmon survival rates has left the region’s tribes facing a future without either wild or hatchery fish. Federal scientists project that salmon survival will decline by as much as 90% over the next 40 years.

The federal agencies responsible for more than 200 hatchery programs — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council — have failed to implement recommendations from their own scientists about how to improve outcomes at the hatcheries they support.

Allyson Purcell is the director of West Coast hatcheries for NOAA, which oversees endangered salmon recovery, sets regulations for hatcheries and funds roughly a third of all Columbia River hatchery production. In an interview, she conceded that federal hatchery reform efforts have historically focused on saving wild salmon, but said that her agency is now researching ways to create more resilient hatchery fish.

“As soon as we have actionable science, we will implement changes,” Purcell said. She also acknowledged that hatcheries will need to change to sustain fish populations as the climate continues to change.

“We want to stay nimble,” she said. “In some cases you may want to change the goal of the hatchery. If you find that you need to rely on it to keep a population from going extinct, you’re going to operate that hatchery program differently.”

People like John Sirois, a former chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington, have been waiting a long time for changes. Nearly a decade ago, he cut the ribbon at the opening of the Chief Joseph Hatchery, 545 miles upriver from the mouth of the Columbia. That hatchery, one of 23 facilities overseen by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, opened in 2013.

But it is now struggling to return enough fish, and the upper Columbia’s spring Chinook population has fallen to one of its lowest levels on record. Last year the Colville Tribes, whose diet was once as much as 60% salmon, caught less than one fish for each of its 10,000 people.

“Despite all the efforts that we’ve done, the salmon run is looking pretty much on the ropes.” Sirois said. “If it’s more difficult for hatcheries to produce salmon, it is the beginning of the end.”

‘A finger in the dike’

There are many reasons that Columbia River salmon die, whether they were born in the wild or in hatcheries. Millions don’t survive their trip down the river, which has become a gantlet of dams and slackwater reservoirs, hot and polluted waters, and invasive predators. Millions more die in the ocean or get snared by commercial fishing ships, ending up as grocery fillets or pet food before they can return upriver toward their spawning grounds.

Some die-off is natural. But the dismal survival rates of salmon bred on the Columbia today are neither natural nor sustainable.

Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica examined the yearly survival of eight Columbia River Basin hatchery populations of vulnerable salmon and steelhead trout, detected at a federal dam on their way out to sea as juveniles and on their way back upriver as adults. This dam-to-dam measure provides one of the only consistent indexes of how well salmon are surviving. But it’s a high-end estimate, because it only measures how well they’re surviving in the ocean. These numbers don’t account for the millions of juvenile fish that die migrating downriver before they’re counted at the dam or the many adults who pass the dam but die before reaching their destination upriver. Our analysis of the publicly available data provides a high-level and easily understandable snapshot of hatchery performance; previously, assessing the health of the hatchery system would have required combing through thousands of pages of government reports and academic research.

Even with this generous estimate, however, the survival rates of these hatchery fish have been well short of the established goals for rebuilding salmon populations, according to the Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis.

According to our analysis, salmon populations released from 2014 to 2018, the most recent years for which complete data was available, had some of the worst survival rates on record. In that time period, none of the eight populations had average returns exceeding 4%, the threshold necessary for a population to recover, which was adopted by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and vetted by independent panels of experts. But even in the previous six years, when ocean conditions were favorable for salmon, only two achieved average returns above 4%.

That 4% goal was established for wild populations, but in a 2015 report to Congress, 17 scientists recommended that survival rates of hatchery fish would have to be high relative to wild fish “to effectively contribute to harvest and/or conservation.”

Most hatcheries, however, aren’t even aiming to meet the council’s recovery goals. Some aim to get less than half a percent of their fish back. But lately, they aren’t even getting that.

“It’s not self-sustaining. We don’t have the numbers,” said Aaron Penney, a member of the Nez Perce who spent more than 20 years managing his tribe’s hatchery on the Clearwater River in Idaho. Penney, now a biologist for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northern Idaho, says raising hatchery fish in worsening river and ocean habitat is like “putting a finger in a dike to stop a leak.”

Records obtained from NOAA show that over the past five years, dozens of hatchery programs have fallen short of their typical production levels, some by more than half. Some have tried to address that shortfall by capturing more wild fish to breed. Others used eggs that were shared by nearby hatcheries.

But major shortages across the Columbia basin in 2018 and 2019 left hatcheries scrambling to find enough egg-bearing female fish. Tribal hatcheries, which are located farther upriver where salmon face a longer, harder journey, bore the brunt. They’ve been planning for shortages to become commonplace as rivers and the Pacific Ocean get hotter.

In 2019, Idaho’s Nez Perce Tribe needed an influx of hundreds of fish from hatcheries 300 miles away in Washington to keep breeding salmon. Staff at the time called it a “dire emergency.”

In central Washington, the Yakama Nation’s share of eggs was so small that its hatchery on the Klickitat River was down to 30% of the number of fish it usually raises.

“It’s impacting the Indians a lot, man,” said Shane Patterson, a member of the Yakama Nation who fishes the Klickitat and works as a catch monitor for the tribe. “The seasons ain’t as long as they used to be, they’re smaller runs, everything.”

Between spring and fall, Patterson and his friend and fellow tribe member Chance Fiander spend evenings atop plywood scaffolds built into the rock face of the Klickitat River canyon, plunging dip nets 30 feet into the waters, awaiting the jolt of a salmon fighting its way upstream.

The Klickitat hatchery provides Patterson and Fiander fish to catch for their families and for the tribe’s longhouses, spiritual gathering centers that need salmon for weekly ceremonies, annual feasts, funerals and coming-of-age ceremonies known as name givings.

This April, there were so few spring Chinook salmon for the annual spring feast Patterson attended — held to honor the first foods of the new year — that it took donated bags of frozen salmon to feed everyone at the longhouse that day.

“That defeats the purpose. That ceremony was for that first food coming up the river,” Patterson said. “It’s just … kinda backwards.”

Power and fish

From the very start, federal agencies had evidence of hatcheries’ failures. But they didn’t leave themselves any other solutions.

Within two decades of enshrining in treaties the right of Northwest tribes to fish for salmon as they always had, the United States government had let commercial fishing deplete salmon runs to the point that the nation’s fish commissioner was devising ways to produce more of them.

In 1872, Spencer Baird, the founder of the agency now known as NOAA Fisheries, built the West Coast’s first salmon hatchery in California and three years later recommended the same solution for the Columbia River’s problems with habitat loss and overfishing.

Baird told fisherman and cannery operators that artificial production would “maintain the present numbers indefinitely, and even … increase them.” Oregon fishing commissioners seized on the idea, declaring that salmon required less labor and care to raise than vegetables.

But the early hatchery efforts faded. By the 1920s, the first analysis of hatcheries at the time found “no evidence” to suggest hatcheries had effectively conserved salmon. Similar research reached the federal Department of Fisheries, a precursor to what is now NOAA Fisheries, in 1929. Amid the poor results and the Great Depression, state and federal fisheries agencies largely abandoned costly large-scale efforts to breed salmon.

Overfishing was the first blow to salmon populations. Dams were the biggest. Between 1933 and 1975, 18 dams were built on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Nearly half of all salmon habitat in the Columbia basin was completely blocked; the rest was drastically altered as humans turned a free-flowing river system into a series of reservoirs and built farms and communities.

The dams destroyed the river’s most important tribal fishing sites and pushed many populations of wild salmon nearly to the point of extinction or wiped them out entirely. But despite the hatcheries’ failures in the early days, the federal government turned to them after damming up the Columbia and the Snake. It was the best offer officials made to the tribes that depended on salmon.

The federal government laid out its position in a 1947 memo, signed by the secretary of the Interior: “The overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thorough-going development of the Snake and Columbia are such that the present salmon run must be sacrificed. Efforts should be directed toward ameliorating the impact of this development upon the injured interests and not toward a vain attempt to hold still the hands of the clock.”

Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service knew at the time there was no evidence to suggest hatcheries could make up for the impact. But four of those scientists, including the author of the 1920s research casting doubt on hatcheries, suggested hatcheries anyway; after seeing the government’s plans for dam construction, biologists knew that preserving existing salmon runs would be essentially impossible.

Hatcheries again failed to offset the damage. By the late 1970s, hatcheries were releasing three times more juvenile salmon than scientists estimate the wild fish ever produced themselves. But fish counts at federal dams showed that while tens of millions more juvenile salmon were heading downriver each year, the number of returning adult salmon kept dropping.

Part of the problem was how the fish were bred. Salmon have lasted millions of years, across multiple ice ages, because of the diversity in their populations. But in the hatcheries, that diversity started to disappear and fish developed traits that make it harder for them to survive in the wild.

Rob Jones, the former head of NOAA’s hatchery division, said the agencies running hatcheries have known this for as long as he can remember, which is why they have always depended on wild populations to bolster their stocks.

“Without infusing hatcheries, from time to time, with better-fit fish,” Jones said, “hatchery fish might taper off and not return anymore. Because their fitness is just so poor.”

In the early 1990s, several salmon populations landed on the endangered species list. Scientists and environmental advocates began to argue that hatchery fish posed a threat to wild salmon recovery.

“Fisheries scientists, by promoting hatchery technology and giving hatchery tours, have misled the public into thinking that hatcheries are necessary and can truly compensate for habitat loss,” Ray Hilborn, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wrote in a 1992 paper. “Hatchery programs that attempt to add additional fish to existing healthy wild stocks are ill advised and highly dangerous.”

By the end of the 1990s, a panel of scientists for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council concluded that hatcheries had failed in their objective to mitigate habitat damage and were harming wild populations by competing for food and spreading weaker genes. And, they noted, other scientific reviews had reached the same conclusion.

“Scientists and fish culturists should be concerned about the findings of three independent scientific panels that concluded hatcheries have generally failed to meet their objectives,” they wrote.

Congress created a task force to reform hatcheries in 2000, aiming to minimize competition between wild and hatchery fish and to keep weaker hatchery-fish genes out of the wild. Soon, hatcheries faced limits on which fish they could breed, how many wild fish they could capture, how many fish they could release, and how many of their fish were allowed to escape to spawn in the wild. Each hatchery program now requires a genetics management plan.

“There was a lot of work on genetics the past couple of decades, and that’s because that’s probably where our biggest concern was,” said Purcell, who succeeded Jones as head of NOAA hatcheries.

But as it focused on wild genetics, NOAA’s reforms largely ignored how hatcheries grow and release their fish. The agency did not require updates to outdated facilities, nor did it order changes to how hatchery fish were penned, fed or released.

Tribes had begun experimenting with new methods of breeding in their own hatcheries. At its hatchery in Cle Elum, Washington, the Yakama Nation painted concrete tanks to match streambeds, tried filling them with woody debris found in streams, and used underwater feeding tubes so fish didn’t get used to being fed at the surface by humans. They bred captured wild fish instead of hatchery stock and used a collection of earthen ponds to acclimate fish to the wild before they’re released. They documented some success at increasing abundance while minimizing the harm to wild genetics.

But endangered species regulations and environmental lawsuits alleged that releases of hatchery fish were threatening wild salmon and compromising their recovery. Tribes found that their only tool for putting fish back into rivers — and for exercising their treaty rights — was under threat.

The National Congress of American Indians in 2015 issued a resolution calling for the protection and maximization of hatchery production. In it, the tribes said that salmon production had been “reduced, restricted, and threatened” by endangered species protections, lack of funding and inaction by NOAA, adding that “a disproportionate burden of conservation” had been “placed on the tribal harvest and hatchery requirements.”

Purcell said NOAA has for many years been backlogged in reviewing hatcheries to make sure their breeding programs adequately protected wild fish. Those delays left hatcheries exposed to lawsuits from environmental groups that have blocked or reduced releases of hatchery fish. Purcell said the agency to date has reviewed about 75% of hatchery programs across Oregon, Washington, California and Idaho.

Purcell acknowledged concern for wild fish has led to some hatchery reductions, but said the agency has tried to avoid that when possible for the sake of tribes.

“NOAA Fisheries understands how important hatchery programs are to the tribes,” she said, “so we work hard to find solutions that work for all involved.”

‘It’s not hopeless’

When salmon return each June to north-central Washington’s Icicle Creek, Sirois, the former chair of the Colville Tribes, drives with a rod and tackle box to the Leavenworth Fish Hatchery, where he sleeps in his car so he can be there when the sun comes up.

He’ll spend a weekend casting for salmon from Icicle Creek. During last June’s run, Sirois fished beside his cousin, with his young nephew perched atop a concrete bridge, watching from above. Across the water, his friend Jason Whalawitsa was fishing with his son atop scaffolds they had built.

The Wenatchi people, part of 12 bands making up the Colville Tribes, spent decades battling in court to reclaim their legal right to fish for salmon in Icicle Creek.

Now, they worry how long the supply of fish will last.

“Our warmer ocean waters don’t allow our fish to get here,” Whalawitsa said.

Salmon numbers have always fluctuated, but salmon biologists say the latest downturn is different: Climate change is making temperatures increasingly inhospitable to salmon, which need cold water. They’ve died by the hundreds of thousands in unusually hot rivers. And in warmer oceans, fish starve without adequate food.

A 2021 study led by NOAA ecologist Lisa Crozier found that warming ocean temperatures could cause salmon survival to decline by roughly 90% within the next 40 years.

“We can imagine all kinds of new situations that could occur. Unfortunately, most of them don’t seem to be favorable for salmon,” Crozier said.

The obstacles to saving salmon are myriad. Large swaths of the Columbia River Basin remain impaired by the effects of excessive heat and chemical pollution, and biologists say habitat restoration efforts are far behind what is needed to give salmon a real chance of rebounding. Advocates of removing the four dams on the lower Snake River to save salmon have gotten the attention of elected officials, but that would only benefit one subset of the basin’s salmon. It wouldn’t help the Wenatchi on the upper Columbia. And salmon there and elsewhere would still need a major boost in fitness to survive the ocean journey.

But Crozier’s study also recommended “desperately needed” actions to restore freshwater habitat, improve river flows and change hatchery practices to give salmon a better chance in the ocean.

“My biggest concern about publishing that paper was that people would say, ‘Oh, salmon are doomed. Let’s give up on them,’” Crozier said. “It’s not hopeless.”

Barry Berejikian, the top hatchery scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, agrees. He points to changes in fish tanks, water temperature and feeding schedules that can all increase hatchery fish’s survival odds. Facilities could also adjust how many fish are released and when: Longtime hatchery philosophy has been to flood the river with fish. But scientists have found that overloading the environment with too many fish can slow population growth, and that varying release times gives fish a better chance of survival.

As climate change damages the habitats of wild salmon, hatchery fish become all the more important.

“As we increasingly rely on them, we need to do them better,” Berejikian said of hatcheries. “Right now, the emphasis is not there.”

Officials at federal agencies governing hatcheries said they know salmon survival needs to improve, but demurred when asked about adopting the strategies Berejikian mentioned.

Most production at the 13 hatcheries run by the Fish and Wildlife Service is governed by legal agreements or settlements, giving the agency little flexibility, spokesperson Brent Lawrence said. He touted the agency’s success in keeping fish alive while they’re at the hatchery and said that fish survival in the wild is largely outside the agency’s control.

“We strive to release the healthiest salmon possible from our hatcheries to give the fish the best chance of survival,” Lawrence said.

Guy Norman, chair of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, acknowledged changes are needed at hatcheries to produce stronger fish. But the council’s latest program called for no such changes. Norman said the council would help facilitate research and improvements, but that it has a limited role in prescribing operations at the state and tribal hatcheries in its program. However, the council has ordered changes in the past, such as stipulating that all hatcheries funded through its program needed to follow recommendations for protecting wild salmon.

Purcell, the NOAA hatcheries official, said her agency is limited in what it can require of hatcheries if the changes aren’t directly impacting an endangered population. And, because most of the region’s hatchery facilities are between 40 and 100 years old, she said recommended improvements like more natural rearing conditions “are not an option without a major rebuild.”

According to documents obtained from NOAA, much of the Columbia River Basin’s hatchery tanks and rearing facilities are near the end of their lifespans, and the basin’s capacity for hatchery production has diminished as failing infrastructure has been decommissioned or put into limited operation.

“That creates a lot of limitations to what we can implement,” Purcell said.

Existing operations at Northwest hatcheries are already underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases parts of their infrastructure have literally crumbled and killed thousands of fish in the process.

At the Lookingglass Hatchery in northeast Oregon, outdated concrete “fish ladders” meant to help salmon escape upstream to spawn are instead blocking them, but the hatchery doesn’t have the $3.4 million needed to fix the problem. Meanwhile, the Lyons Ferry Hatchery in southeast Washington lost 250,000 fish this year because of a crumbling rubber gasket. Last year, it spent more than $5 million on a burst pipe and a pump failure.

In all, records show staff at federally funded hatcheries have identified more than $320 million in repairs and equipment upgrades they can’t make unless the government provides funding.

Congress has kept hatchery funding essentially flat for more than a decade, leaving those needs unaddressed. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, sought to include $400 million for hatcheries as part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. It would have been the single largest expenditure on hatcheries ever. That effort failed along with the bill. Cantwell did not respond to requests for comment.

Overhauling hatcheries to withstand climate change will cost hundreds of millions more. For instance, the Fish and Wildlife Service predicts that warming waters will lead to more disease and harm the growth of its fish, and that droughts could lead to water shortages on site. The agency has not yet requested additional funding to address what it calls “climate vulnerabilities” at Leavenworth or elsewhere.

‘All I can do is pray’

More than a decade ago, Whalawitsa and his son Chris began fishing beside the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery, where the current system only supports about half the promised production levels.

Whalawitsa and Chris fish hook-and-line by day and with traditional dip nets all night, trying to fill orders for tribal elders, family members and sick neighbors to help sustain them through winters on the reservation.

“We’re doing the best we can to keep this alive,” Whalawitsa said. “All I can do is pray and hope that this gets better because I want to see my grandchildren fish this.”

When they first started, they’d easily fill five coolers in a single trip and end up racing back and forth to the reservation to make room for more.

Now, they say, they’re lucky to fill one.

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ProPublica’s Maya Miller contributed reporting.

This article was produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up here to get its next investigation. OPB is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

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Graphics: Hatcheries aren’t rebuilding salmon populations in the Columbia basin

To rebuild the salmon populations, 4% of juveniles would have to return as adults:

Travis Wendt of Lewiston, Idaho hooked a massive 23.5-inch smallmouth bass while fishing Dworshak Reservoir on May 10th. After a quick photo, Travis released the bass back into the lake, and secured a new catch-and-release state record.

His trophy bronzeback eclipsed the previous record of 22.75 inches set by Dustin Shepard only two years earlier in 2020. 

Dworshak Reservoir – formed by the North Fork Clearwater River in north central Idaho – has a long and well-deserved reputation for trophy smallmouth bass. The reservoir has produced the last 2 catch-and-release records, but also holds all the certified-weight records for smallmouth bass since 1982.

A quick review of certified weight records, and you can see that Travis’ new 23.5″ fish easily competes with some of the heaviest bass recorded from Dworshak Reservoir, and may have been close to the existing weight record of 9.72lbs (23.75 inches).

Don Schiefelbein – 7.35 lbs – 20.75 inches – September 4, 1982

Dan Steigers – 8.3 lbs – 22.0 inches – October 14, 1995

Dan Steigers – 9.72 lbs – 23.75″ – October 28, 2006 (Still current!)

Biologists have learned that big bass in Dworshak have a cyclical pattern, related to the fluctuating numbers of kokanee in the reservoir. In years when kokanee are abundant – and usually smaller as a result – they provide the ample food needed to grow supersize smallmouth.

Fisheries biologist Eli Felts works on Dworshak, and started noticing the abundant small kokanee in the last two years. “The bass growth tends to lag a year, so I expect to really start seeing the effect of the recent increase in kokanee abundance this year,” he said.

Here is some growth data collected from two different Dworshak smallmouth bass, growing up in different years. The bass were the same age when collected – 7 years old – but were dramatically different in size. The first bass grew up during the lean years in 2014 when kokanee numbers had been low. The second bass was collected later in 2016 – only 1 year after near record kokanee numbers – and was almost 4 inches longer at the same age! After bass reach 10-12 inches, they are big enough to eat abundant kokanee and can achieve tremendous growth.

This is a good example of how reservoir conditions can influence the average size of fish by driving food resources. Felts said he thinks conditions in Dworshak could be ripe for another record soon. “Last fall I received multiple reports of smallmouth over 8 pounds being caught, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the current state record be challenged over the next couple of years.”

Also see:

— CBB, March 31, 2022, DWORSHAK RESERVOIR LOADED WITH (RECORD-HIGH) MILLIONS OF SMALL KOKANEE, GIVES SMALLMOUTH BASS OPPORTUNITY TO BEEF UP https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/dworshak-reservoir-loaded-with-record-high-millions-of-small-kokanee-gives-smallmouth-bass-opportunity-to-beef-up/

Columbia Riverkeeper and Weyerhaeuser Company reached an agreement this week settling Riverkeeper’s Clean Water Act lawsuit against the timber giant at its Longview mill. The consent decree must undergo a 45-day review period for the U.S. Department of Justice and then be approved by a federal district court judge before it can go into effect.

As part of the agreement, Weyerhaeuser will need to make numerous improvements to its timber mill facility to reduce the company’s industrial pollution.

“People rely on the Columbia for clean water and strong salmon runs. No corporation, including Weyerhaeuser, has the right to flout the law and pollute this irreplaceable river,” says Simone Anter, staff attorney at Columbia Riverkeeper. “The requirements of this agreement will see significant steps to reduce pollution at this massive facility.”

In the settlement, Weyerhaeuser agreed to make significant changes to reduce the amount of pollution that flows off the 260-acre facility and into the Columbia River. Changes include rerouting a stormwater pipe to flow into a Waste Treatment Plant, instead of the Columbia River. Installation of aerators and particulate screens to reduce the biological oxygen demand and turbidity in discharges and installing flow meters to provide more timely data on stormwater discharges is also required under the agreement.

To make up for past pollution and deter any future violations of the Clean Water Act, the settlement requires Weyerhaeuser to make a payment in lieu of a penalty of $600,000 to the foundation Seeding Justice, which will award grants for projects benefiting water quality in the Columbia River Basin. The company will also be required to pay additional penalties up to $5,000 if certain violations recur in the future.

The Columbia River Basin, an area the size of France, accumulates pollution from industry, wastewater treatment plants, and runoff from agricultural lands, logging, industrial sites, and city streets, says Columbia Riverkeeper.

“As a result, the Columbia River and many tributaries are severely degraded by pollution. Toxic pollution threatens the health of people that eat local fish and jeopardizes the public’s right to eat fish caught locally. Rising water temperatures also threaten the health of salmon and other aquatic life that rely on cool water for survival.”

Columbia Riverkeeper’s staff attorney and Kampmeier & Knutsen PLLC represented Columbia Riverkeeper in the case.

The objective of the Clean Water Act, enacted in 1972, “is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” The Clean Water Act requires facilities that discharge wastewater into rivers or lakes to have permits limiting pollution. The Clean Water Act also empowers individuals and organizations to enforce those permits and protect the public’s right to clean, safe rivers.

Columbia Riverkeeper is a non-profit organization with over 16,000 members.

Weyerhaeuser is one of the world’s largest forest and forest products companies. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it employs about 9,000 people.

Also see:

— CBB, Dec. 4, 2019, COURT SETTLEMENT REQUIRES CORPS TO REDUCE OIL POLLUTION FROM CHIEF JOSEPH DAM, APPLY FOR CLEAN WATER ACT PERMIT https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/court-settlement-requires-corps-to-reduce-oil-pollution-from-chief-joseph-dam-apply-for-clean-water-act-permit/

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking public input on its draft periodic status review for snowy plover.

The agency is recommending maintaining the species’ classification as endangered in the state of Washington.

The Pacific coast breeding population of snowy plovers extends from Washington to northwestern Mexico. In Washington, the species is found only in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties. The Washington population consists of less than 100 adult birds and is dependent on immigration from Oregon.

Populations are responding to intensive conservation efforts, but viability analysis indicates that the Pacific coast population is unlikely to reach the federal recovery objective of 3,000 birds without further conservation actions.

The draft periodic status review for the Western snowy plover is available for review at WDFW’s publications webpage.

The public can provide comments on the drafts through Aug. 5.

Snowy plovers are small, pale-colored shorebirds with dark patches on either side of the upper breast.

The birds prefer coastal sand spits, dune-packed beaches, beaches at creek and river mouths and salt pans at lagoons and estuaries. The breeding season from April through early August. Biologists attribute the decline of the species to loss of nesting habitat due to development of dune areas, the encroachment of European beach grass into former open dune areas, human disturbance of nest sites, and nest predation by raccoons, ravens and non-native red foxes.

The Hood River Canal Bridge is a major source of mortality for migrating steelhead smolts, according to new research by NOAA Fisheries Northwest Fisheries Science Center scientists and the non-profit Long Live the Kings. Approximately half the smolts tracked by researchers died attempting to get past the bridge or soon after.

“Coastal infrastructure alters behavior and increases predation mortality of threatened Puget Sound steelhead smolts,” was published in the journal Ecosphere.

“We had no idea this bridge was causing such an impact on steelhead migrating out of Hood Canal,” says Megan Moore, a researcher biologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the study.

Using acoustic telemetry tags safely implanted in the fish and an array of more than 30 receivers at various points along their migration route, the researchers found the steelhead smolts slowed considerably at the bridge. The fish took one to two days on average to navigate past the bridge compared to just 5 to 7 hours to travel through open, unobstructed sections of the canal.

The Hood Canal Bridge spans the northern outlet of Hood Canal in Washington’s Puget Sound. It is called a floating bridge, but the construction actually extends 15 feet below the surface. Migrating steelhead tend to swim near the surface, so the submerged section of the bridge forms a partial barrier for steelhead migrating from Hood Canal to the Pacific Ocean.

“The fish coming down the river run essentially into this big concrete wall,” says Moore. “All the signals they use to navigate like currents and salinity are thrown off by the bridge. And so they slow down and pause, trying to figure out what to do.”

But the physical barrier of the bridge is only one part of the problem, notes Moore. The steelhead smolts can figure out how to eventually get past it. The real challenge faced by the migrating steelhead, say researchers, are the predators that congregate around the bridge.

Steelhead typically swim rapidly through Hood Canal toward the ocean. The Hood Canal Bridge acts as a speed bump, slowing their progress. But unlike a speed bump, the fish have a hard time figuring out which way to go. This pause makes them more vulnerable to predators, like harbor seals, which are now plentiful in the area.

The researchers have monitored these steelhead since 2006. They’ve seen mortality increase steadily over the years, likely due to a combination of an increased number of predators and those predators learning how and where to catch the steelhead.

Using the temperature and location data transmitted from the tag implanted in the fish, researchers can pinpoint when and where a steelhead smolt was likely eaten. A spike in temperature and a non-moving tag indicates that the fish has been eaten.

Puget Sound Steelhead are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Most populations have declined since listing in 2007. For the population to grow, more smolts need to make it from the rivers to the ocean and back again. Losing as many as half the migrating fish due to predation at the Hood Canal Bridge has a significant impact on the populations. Researchers estimate that only 1 in 10 migrating steelhead makes it to the ocean. Reducing mortality along the way, such as that at the Hood Canal Bridge, could possibly double their survival and help add individuals who could grow the population.

But solutions are hard to come by, say the researchers. Moore and her colleagues are looking at a range of solutions, including changing the bridge design and devices to deter predators when the steelhead are at their most vulnerable, that they look forward to testing in 2023. 

Also see:

— CBB, Jan. 2, 2020, NOAA FISHERIES RELEASES FINAL RECOVERY PLAN FOR PUGET SOUND STEELHEAD; CITES CULVERTS, EARLY MARINE SURVIVAL AS KEY THREATS https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/noaa-fisheries-releases-final-recovery-plan-for-puget-sound-steelhead-cites-culverts-early-marine-survival-as-key-threats/

— CBB, Jan. 15, 2021, WASHINGTON STATE SALMON RECOVERY REPORT: MOST POPULATIONS NOT MAKING PROGRESS, SOME ON PATH TO EXTINCTION https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/washington-state-salmon-recovery-report-most-populations-not-making-progress-some-on-path-to-extinction/

— CBB, Nov. 4, 2021, PUGET SOUND REPORT SHOWS FEW RECOVERY INDICATORS MEETING TARGETS; SALMON, ORCA ABUNDANCE LEAST PROGRESS https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/puget-sound-report-shows-few-recovery-indicators-meeting-targets-salmon-orca-abundance-least-progress/

Last week, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, joined with science leaders to help break ground on a $75 million facility that will boost clean energy adoption and make the nation’s power grid more resilient, secure and flexible.

Speaking at the dedication ceremony at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Cantwell said “The Grid Storage Launchpad represents a huge investment in PNNL, the Tri Cities, the State of Washington and the future of our nation. The Launchpad will help us make America’s grid more reliable and resilient, lead the world in inventing and exporting clean energy products, and accelerate the transition to a cleaner energy system. PNNL has my continued support as it strives to make the Launchpad the world’s premier energy storage research center.”

“Next-generation energy storage is foundational to our nation’s ambitious energy goals, serving as the bridge between renewable energy sources and a resilient power grid,” added PNNL Director Steven Ashby. “At the Grid Storage Launchpad, nationally renowned researchers from PNNL and across the country will forge fundamental discoveries and applied innovations critical to realizing our clean energy future.”

At the GSL, scientists will validate and test new grid storage technologies—from basic materials and components to prototype devices—under realistic operating conditions. It will promote rigorous grid performance requirements for all stages of technology development and accelerate the development of innovative technologies.

“The Grid Storage Launchpad facility will boost clean energy adaptation and accelerate the development and deployment of long-duration, low-cost grid energy storage,” said Gil Bindewald, acting principal deputy assistant secretary at DOE’s Office of Electricity, which provided funding for the GSL. “Energy storage is a critical step on the path to getting more renewable power on the system, supporting a growing fleet of electric vehicles, making our grid more reliable and securing our clean energy future. Breakthroughs at this exciting facility will help provide clean, affordable, and resilient energy to everyone, everywhere.”

The GSL supports DOE’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge, which draws on the extensive research capabilities of the DOE national laboratories, universities and industry to accelerate the development of energy storage technologies. The ESGC also helps sustain American global leadership in the creation of energy storage technologies while providing for a secure domestic manufacturing supply chain.

DOE’s Office of Electricity selected PNNL as the site for the GSL in August 2019, noting PNNL’s extensive work in grid energy storage and power grid modernization, as well as its research on improving battery performance, reliability and safety.

The 86,000-square-foot facility will include space for 35 research laboratories and offices for approximately 105 staff representing a breadth of scientific disciplines. It will include testing chambers to assess prototypes and new grid energy storage technologies up to 100 kilowatts under realistic operating conditions. A laboratory dedicated to understanding fundamental material properties of storage technologies will also be included.

A visualization laboratory with multimedia displays will allow scientists to analyze the role of energy storage in future grid scenarios and to develop new design criteria. The GSL will have flexible workstations and collaboration spaces, including dedicated space for researchers to develop storage technologies originating from the U.S. research and development community.

In addition to federal funding, the state of Washington contributed $8.3 million from the Clean Energy Fund for advanced research instruments that will bring about new insights into the behavior of battery materials in real time. With the funding, PNNL purchased two state-of-the-art Thermo Fisher electron microscopes and a Thermo Fisher spectrometer that will allow researchers to view changes to battery materials as they charge and discharge.

The Houston-based firms of Harvey-Cleary Builders and Kirksey Architecture were awarded the contract to design and build the GSL last April. The partnership also served as the design-build team for the Energy Sciences Center, a $90 million research facility that opened on the PNNL-Richland campus late last year.

The GSL is expected to be ready for occupancy as soon as 2023.

Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit this week to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine whether Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.

These unique parasitic pollinators were once common in prairies, meadows and grasslands across the western United States and Canada but have declined by more than 78%. The last sighting of the bees was in Oregon in 2017. Over the past two decades, a few scattered individuals have been spotted in California, Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

“Protecting these parasitic bees may seem strange, but parasites play an irreplaceable role in keeping other bee populations healthy,” said Jess Tyler, a staff scientist at the Center and a petition co-author. “Imperiled insects like Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees deserve the same rigorous protection consideration we give to mammals and fish. When we fail to aggressively prevent the extinction of small creatures, we create huge ecological ripple effects that end up harming many other species.”

Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees are threatened by declines in their host species, habitat degradation, overgrazing, pesticide use and climate change.

“The fundamental purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to preserve imperiled species,” said Kylah Staley, a legal fellow at the Center. “Delays in providing Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees the protections they need to survive undermines our laws protecting endangered wildlife.”

In April 2020 the Center petitioned to protect Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees. The deadline for the Fish and Wildlife Service to make a final listing decision was April 2021. The lawsuit seeks to require the Service to complete its legally required review.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in May, 2021 announced that Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebee, an imperiled species that has recently declined by more than 90%, may warrant ESA protection. The announcement kicked off a one-year status assessment of the species.

After reviewing the information in the petition, the Service concluded there is substantial information that listing under the ESA may be warranted.

This would be the first cuckoo bumblebee protected under the ESA and the second bumblebee, with the rusty patched bumblebee being the first.

The decline of Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees is part of a troubling downward trend in many of the 46 species of bumblebees and approximately 3,600 species of native bees in the United States that are needed to pollinate wild plants. The generalist pollinator is among a rare group of parasitic cuckoo bumblebees that play important regulatory roles in bumblebee communities and ecosystems.

While their specific methods remain unknown, female Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees must fight or sneak into a host colony, then kill or subdue the host queen. The cuckoo bee then lays her own eggs and controls the workers to continue collecting pollen and nectar to feed her offspring.

The survival of Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees is dependent on the welfare of their primary host, western bumblebees, who have declined by 93%. The Center is also working to obtain ESA protection for western bumblebees.

The legal complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.

Also see:

— CBB, May 13, 2021, USFWS SAYS WILL CONSIDER SUCKLEY’S CUCKOO BUMBLEBEE FOR ESA LISTING; LAST SIGHTING IN OREGON IN 2017 https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/usfws-says-will-consider-suckleys-cuckoo-bumblebee-for-esa-listing-last-sighting-in-oregon-in-2017/

Anglers in Washington can expect similar salmon fishing opportunities this year compared to 2021, with some improved opportunities in the ocean driven by strong expected coho returns, state fishery managers have announced.

The 2022-23 salmon fishing seasons, cooperatively developed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and treaty tribal co-managers, were tentatively set Tuesday afternoon at a week-long Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting held online and in-person in Seattle.

“We continue to see low returns of some stocks across Washington, especially Chinook stocks, and our first priority is to craft fisheries that conserve and aid recovery of those runs,” said WDFW Director Kelly Susewind. “At the same time, there are bright spots in this year’s forecast, and we developed what we believe are some novel ways to maximize opportunities in areas where healthy runs might mingle with those weaker stocks.”

Negotiations between WDFW and co-managers this year were guided in part by a new Puget Sound Harvest Management Plan that has been submitted to federal regulators and is expected to provide long-term fishery guidance for Puget Sound if approved.

— CBB, Feb. 24, 2022, PUGET SOUND CHINOOK HARVEST PLAN SUBMITTED TO NMFS FOR APPROVAL; WOULD REDUCE SOME FISHING TO PROTECT ‘CRITICALLY DEPRESSED’ STOCKS

“Now that we’ve met the challenge of providing harvest opportunities, the co-managers need to get back to the work of recovering salmon,” said Shawn Yanity, vice chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. “Protecting treaty rights is not about fighting over the last fish. It’s about salmon recovery in the long term.”

Season recommendations now move forward for approval by the National Marine Fisheries Service and final rulemaking, including additional opportunity for public comment and consideration of those comments.

Puget Sound

Low returns of Stillaguamish Chinook are expected to continue affecting fisheries across Puget Sound. Stillaguamish and Snohomish Chinook returns will especially impact fishing in the San Juan Islands (Marine Area 7) and Admiralty Inlet (Marine Area 9). Managers have proposed a three-day hatchery Chinook and coho fishery from July 14-16 in those areas, followed by a coho-directed fishery starting Aug. 16.

“Strong catch rates and fishing pressure led to some early closures in these areas last year, and we wanted to make sure we do not exceed our catch allocations in 2022,” said Kyle Adicks, intergovernmental salmon manager with WDFW. “We heard from many anglers that they wanted an opportunity to fish in July in these areas, and this offers some opportunity while still hopefully preserving the chance to fish on what’s expected to be a solid coho run later in the summer.”

Winter Chinook fisheries will again be limited in Puget Sound in 2022-23, with some Chinook retention opportunity available in November and December in Marine Area 11 (Tacoma-Vashon Island), February and March in Marine Area 10 (Seattle-Bremerton), and March and April in Marine Area 5 (Sekiu).

Most Puget Sound marine areas will once again open for the summer season beginning in July or August, with June openers currently planned for Marine Areas 10 and 11.

Columbia River

Summer fisheries on the Columbia River are expected to be reduced compared to last year, with fishing from the Astoria-Megler bridge to Highway 395 bridge in Pasco starting June 16. The fishery below Bonneville is scheduled to be open through June 22. Sockeye retention is not allowed.

Fall fisheries from Buoy 10 to the Highway 395 bridge in Pasco is planned for an Aug. 1 opener, with different dates by area for Chinook and coho, and includes steelhead restrictions throughout the river. Another strong coho run is expected and a similar Chinook run size compared to last year should provide for some good fishing opportunities.

Ocean fisheries

Coho are expected to return in large numbers to the Washington coast in 2022, and in coastal marine areas coho quotas reflect those improved forecasts. Fishery managers agreed during this week’s PFMC meeting to recreational ocean quotas of 27,000 Chinook and 168,000 marked coho, more than double the 2021 coho quota.

LaPush (Marine Area 3) and Neah Bay (Marine Area 4) will open for salmon retention beginning June 18, followed by Ilwaco (Marine Area 1) on June 25 and Westport-Ocean Shores (Marine Area 2) on July 2. All areas are scheduled to remain open until Sept. 30 or until quotas are met, with species and size restrictions dependent on the area.

Spring Chinook fishing will open under normal permanent regulations on Oregon’s Umatilla River this year for the first time since 2018.

Due to poor returns, the fishery was closed entirely in 2020 and 2019, and did not open until May 25 last year. Fishery managers are predicting a good return of approximately 3,000 spring Chinook for the Umatilla River this year, which is almost double last year’s actual return.

Regulations for the fishery are as follows:

-Open for adult hatchery Chinook from April 16 to June 10 from the Hwy 730 bridge to Three Mile Falls Dam and from April 16 to June 30 from Three Mile Falls Dam to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation boundary (approximately 0.7 mi above Hwy 11 bridge).

-The catch limit is two adult hatchery salmon per day, and five hatchery jack salmon per day.

-All wild Chinook salmon must be released unharmed.

-One the harvest quota has been reached, the fishery will be closed.

According to Taylor McCroskey, ODFW fish biologist, the Umatilla fishery provides anglers opportunities of catching a spring Chinook both on the bank and also via boat in the first three quarters of a river mile above the Hwy 730 bridge.

McCroskey said the run usually peaks in mid to late May due to the warmer water temperatures in the Umatilla River. Anglers have multiple spots they can access the river and should check landownership prior to fishing to make sure they are allowed access at that location.

Meanwhile, ODFW has set the following regulations for a spring Chinook fishery on the Hood River:

–Open for adult hatchery Chinook from April 15 through June 30 from the mouth to mainstem confluence with the East Fork, and the West Fork from the confluence with the mainstem upstream to the angling deadline 200 feet downstream of Punchbowl Falls.

–The catch limit is one adult hatchery salmon per day, and five hatchery jack salmon per day.

— All wild Chinook salmon must be released unharmed.

Fishery managers are predicting a good return of about 1,200 adult hatchery fish for the Hood River, which is quite a bit higher than last year’s actual return.

There will be no season for spring Chinook on the Deschutes River for 2022 due to another year of predicted poor returns of both hatchery and wild fish.

According to Jason Seals, ODFW fish biologist, the Hood River fishery is one of the few places a bank angler has a pretty good chance of catching a Columbia River spring Chinook. Seals said the run usually peaks in late May due to colder water temperatures in the Hood River.

I am responding to the letter to the editor from Scott Levy that the CBB published on April 7, 2022.

As a Fish and Wildlife Biologist for the Walla Walla District, Corps of Engineers from 1971 to 2000, I was there when disinformation and misinformation began to spread and hints of breaching the four lower Snake River dams started.  I was there through the “nitrogen” problem of the 70s.  I was there during the development of the juvenile salmon bypass systems and the juvenile fish transportation program.  I was there during the Endangered Species Act report development and listing.  I was there when the Bonneville Power Administration Fish and Wildlife Program began.

I was also there when the Corps conducted one of its largest ever feasibility studies in the late 1990s addressing alternatives, including breaching the lower Snake River dams to save the salmon.  In fact, Jim Waddell was a senior executive at the Walla Walla Corps at the time.  He once told me that he favored breaching the dams because it would make years and millions of dollars of work for the Corps.  Fortunately, the Corps did not agree with him then, preferring to continue efforts to modify the dams and their operations to improve salmon survival. 

Continuing a program that started in the 1950s of working with the region’s fishery and environmental agencies, survival of adult spring chinook and steelhead has improved to over 99 percent per dam, and survival of juvenile spring chinook and steelhead is over 95 percent per dam through improved bypass systems and turbine and spill operations.  I was involved in the development of the juvenile fish transportation program that has continuously since the 1980s provided over 98 percent survival through the eight Corps dam and reservoir complexes though use of this system has been curtailed by the fishery agencies and tribes.  And since I left, one new turbine with 98.25 percent survival has been installed at Ice Harbor Dam, and a second one is under contract now.

I was there when we concluded that even though spill was not the safest way to get juvenile salmon downstream past the dams, we could make a modification that would make spill a safer and more effective way of passing the dams.  We devised the overflow weir concept in the late 1990s.  Knowing that juvenile salmon leaving a natural lake are attracted to and pass out of the lake by the outlet stream, we advocated modifying one spillway bay at each dam to make a “natural,” overflow outlet. The remaining 7 to 21 spillway bays the eight Corps Snake and Columbia dams spill under gates at a depth of 40 to 50 feet. Juvenile fish are forced to dive down to an unnatural outlet, shot under the gate at 45 miles per hour with rapid decompression to the dam tailrace where there is extreme turbulence and elevated dissolve gas levels.  Using only the overflow weir would be the safest way of protecting the salmon and it would provide more electrical energy for future global warming needs.

In the 1970s, spillway passage was severely discouraged.  I was there when the states and EPA tried to set Total Dissolved Gas limits at 105 percent.  We said it was an impossible limit because water was coming from Hells Canyon at 108 percent.  The limit was subsequently set at 110 percent, but the fishery agencies and environmentalists have forced the Corps to spill up to 120 percent and now up to 125 percent with mass spill.  That means juvenile salmon must pass under 31 undershot spill gates at the Snake River Dams and over 80 more undershot spill gates at the four Columbia Corps dams.  When the TDG level is elevated below Lower Granite Dam, it is boosted back up at each of the next seven dams and continues at a high level all the way to the estuary.  While many self-appointed experts say spill is the safest way to get juvenile salmon past the dams, I say mass spill unnecessarily subjects juvenile salmon to harmful conditions TDG conditions for over 400 miles of the migration corridor.

Not only, are they subjecting juvenile salmon, adult salmon migrating upstream must migrate upstream intoxicated and debilitated by high dissolve gas levels in their blood.  Far less has been learned about the effects of high TDG levels on adult salmon or their ultimate survival and success at spawning but it is known that there is substantial mortality to the hatcheries, spawning ground, and fisheries allowed above the dams.

Mr. Levy says, “It seems obvious that the Northwest Power Act, the Endangered Species Act and Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution all provide sufficient language for the judicial branch to order dam breaching.”  For over six years, I was the Chief of the Environmental Section of the Walla Walla Corps.  I was there when an Idaho representative of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council asked the question and was clearly reminded that only the US. Congress has the authority to breach the dams that were authorized by the US Congress.  I am sure Judge Simon and his predecessors in this long litigious battle know this truth.

Mr. Levy advocates: “… promoting an open and honest dialogue concerning the plight of Idaho’s wild Salmon and Steelhead….”  I am sure that if Mr. Levy, Mr. Waddell, and others like them spent more time seeking the real facts and less time litigating, spent more on the real solutions like restoring access and quality to spawning areas, and supported better regulation of harvest to return more, healthy adult fish to perpetuate the runs, much of the money wasted for the last three decades could have been more effectively spent for salmon survival.

John McKern

Fish Passage Solutions, LLC

mckernj@charter.net

Fishery managers from Washington and Oregon last week approved an opportunity to catch and retain legal-size white sturgeon in the lower 40 miles of the Columbia River beginning May 11.

Staff with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife agreed to open the sturgeon fishery on Wednesdays and Saturdays from May 11 through June 4, from Buoy 10 at the mouth of the Columbia River upstream to the Wauna powerlines, which cross Puget Island near Cathlamet. Adjacent Washington tributaries will also be open for sturgeon fishing those days.

Anglers will also have an opportunity to catch and keep sturgeon on Memorial Day, Monday, May 30.

All sturgeon fishing — including catch-and-release fishing — closes at 2 p.m. on those days.

Anglers may retain only white sturgeon measuring 44 to 50 inches from the tip of their nose to the fork in their tail (“fork length”). Catch limits during the season are one legal-size white sturgeon per day and two legal-size fish per year. Only one single-point, barbless hook is allowed when fishing for sturgeon. Anglers may not fish for or retain green sturgeon, which is a federally protected species.

Estuary anglers will be allowed to harvest up to 1,920 of the estimated 100,014 legal-size sturgeon below Bonneville Dam.

“There are fewer legal-size fish to retain in this year’s fishery, but we worked hard to develop a season that offers meaningful opportunity for anglers to catch some of these remarkable fish while still keeping us within our conservation guidelines,” said Laura Heironimus, sturgeon manager with WDFW. “We continue to focus efforts on conserving mature spawning adults to help rebuild the sturgeon population in the Columbia River.”

Catch-and-release fishing for sturgeon is also open year-round on many stretches of the Columbia River, including the lower Columbia River on days closed to retention. Be sure to check permanent rules in the Sport Fishing Regulations pamphlet at https://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/regulations

Last month, fisheries managers noted a recent stock status report that said the number of legal-sized white sturgeon – 38 to 54 inches in fork length – in the lower Columbia River is trending downward, while the number of larger adult sized fish is trending upward.

Most concerning, however, is that the percentage of juvenile fish (under 38 inches) to the percentage of legal and adult fish in the lower river is lower than 60 percent, the conservation status threshold for juveniles, and far below the desired status of 95 percent of the total population.

Still, fisheries managers at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which completed the 2021 stock status report, have determined that sturgeon abundance in the lower river is sufficient to allow for harvest this year as long as the harvest is set at a conservative level of catch.

The population status of white sturgeon in the lower river – Bonneville Dam to the river’s mouth – is far from what fisheries managers would like to see, but the population is still robust and not in danger of a population collapse.

The stock status report described white sturgeon status indicators as “mixed,” with about 312,144 fish that are larger in size than 21-inches fork length in the lower river.

The report – an annual joint effort by ODFW and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife – estimates the abundance of legal-sized white sturgeon (38 to 54 inches) in the lower river at 122,395 fish. While that’s a decline from previous years (last year’s abundance was estimated to be over 160,000 fish), it is still above the conservation status threshold. Estimates for legal sized fish had previously declined to a low of 72,700 fish in 2012, but increased steadily through 2016, reaching a peak of 224,000 fish. However, abundance began to decline again to 162,200 in 2018 and 168,200 in 2019. The 2020 estimate was 199,500 fish, 19 percent higher than in 2019.

The Oregon Ocean Science Trust has awarded $1.1 million in state funding to ocean researchers to help Oregon better understand and monitor and ocean changes.

The funding was made available as a result of HB3114, which passed during the 2021 legislative session, and allocated the funds to the OOST to address ocean acidification and hypoxia (OAH) and the risks it poses to the state’s economy and ecosystems. Through competitive grants, the funds have been distributed to marine researchers.

“We have completed our competitive bid process to award all of the funding the 2021 Oregon Legislature allocated for these important ocean issues, and we’re excited to track and share the results of these important research projects,” said Laura Anderson, Chair of the Oregon Ocean Science Trust.

The funding by the 2021 Oregon Legislature addressed priority actions in Oregon’s OAH Plan. The grant funding that has been awarded to date will address OAH in a variety of ways, from developing best management practices that help conserve and restore submerged aquatic vegetation while supporting healthy shellfish populations and aquaculture, to better understanding ecosystem function in subtidal and intertidal marine reserves.

“Oregonians will have a better understanding of the science that drives changes in our ocean and estuaries, which will inform steps everyone can take to ensure we have healthy marine ecosystems for coastal economies and Oregon fisheries.” said Caren Braby, OAH Council Co-Chair.

OAH Council Co-Chair Jack Barth added, “Understanding factors that contribute to ocean acidification and low oxygen levels in water is critical for ocean and estuary conservation and management. The results from these research projects will improve our understanding of changes in oceans and estuaries, and inform conservation and management strategies to mitigate these changes.”

In March of 2022, the OOST awarded grants to:

— Dr. Tarang Khangaonkar and colleagues from the University of Washington along with partners from the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, the University of Oregon, and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians to evaluate the interaction of water quality and eelgrass in Coos Bay using a biophysical model. A total of $131,126 will enhance Oregon’s ability to inform estuarine conservation and management.

— Dr. Melissa Ward and colleagues from San Diego State University and partners from Oregon State University to develop science-based management practices for co-management of Oregon submerged aquatic vegetation and shellfish. A total of $170,520 will support the conservation and restoration of estuarine submerged aquatic vegetation while supporting shellfish aquaculture and native shellfish populations.

In February of 2022, the OOST awarded grants to:

— Dr. Francis Chan of Oregon State University to enhance subtidal and intertidal OAH monitoring at Oregon’s Marine Reserves. A total of $385,088 will guide future state investments that protect ecologically important places in Oregon’s Territorial Sea.

— Dr. Robert Cowen of Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Science Center to establish a long-term OAH monitoring station in Yaquina Bay, including data collection and dissemination system. A total of $97,407 will help Oregonians understand impacts of ocean change in an important economic, research, and management hub for Oregon.

— Dr. George Waldbusser of Oregon State University to map the dynamics of OAH in the Yaquina Bay estuary and the related biological responses in native Olympia oysters. A total of $174,989 will expand scientific knowledge on an ecologically and culturally significant species that is potentially vulnerable to ocean change.

— Pathways Collaborative to develop messaging that helps the public understand the science, impacts, and solutions associated with ocean acidification and hypoxia. A total of $63,376 will empower coastal communities to take informed actions that contribute to a more robust future using positive, solutions-oriented messaging.

For more information on each project, and to track the progress of each project during the next two years, visit www.oostoahrfp.com  and the OOST website. The OOST will announce additional competitive grant opportunities and awards for applied OAH research, management, and communications in the coming months as a result of House Bill 5202, which provided $1,000,000 in additional funding added to the OOST research grant program by the 2022 Oregon Legislature. The funds will be used for science and monitoring on nearshore keystone species, including sea otters, nearshore marine ecosystems, kelp and eelgrass habitat, and sequestration of blue carbon.

— CBB, July 16, 2020, OREGON COMMISSION ADOPTS ‘CLIMATE AND OCEAN CHANGE POLICY,’ FIRST IN NATION ADOPTED BY STATE FISH/WILDLIFE AGENCY https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/oregon-commission-adopts-climate-and-ocean-change-policy-first-in-nation-adopted-by-state-fish-wildlife-agency/

Traces of DNA that fish species leave behind in the water can reveal the abundance and distribution of fish over large areas of the ocean as accurately as conventional fisheries survey methods, new research shows.

The research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B demonstrates for the first time that environmental DNA, known as eDNA, offers a less-expensive means of measuring populations of fish such as Pacific hake, or whiting, which supports the largest commercial fishery off the West Coast. Fishery managers and fishing fleets depend on such assessments to understand the distribution of species and how many fish fishing fleets can catch.“This information is a staple for fisheries management, and eDNA can potentially provide it in a cost-effective way,” said Andrew Shelton, a research scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle and lead author of the research. “It gives you a snapshot of what fish are in the water without ever catching any.”

Scientists tested the power of eDNA off the West Coast by gathering water samples at multiple depths across 186 locations off the West Coast during hake surveys on the NOAA research ship Bell M. Shimada in 2019. The ship simultaneously employed acoustic methods that used sound to gauge fish populations. Scientists validate the acoustic findings by trawling on targets identified from the acoustics, which provides valuable information on the year-classes of hake as well.

Researchers later analyzed the water samples in the laboratory for hake DNA, which the fish constantly shed into the environment as they swim. Charting the concentrations of hake DNA gauged the abundance of the species as accurately as acoustic and trawl findings across a swath of ocean about the size of South Carolina.

There are limits to the information that eDNA provides. While acoustic and trawl survey methods can often determine the size and age of fish, eDNA mainly shows abundance and distribution. Researchers said that eDNA results could be used initially to complement acoustic or other conventional survey methods, adding precision to stock assessments.

Earlier research demonstrated the value of eDNA surveys in assessing the presence of species in lakes, rivers, and coastal waters. For example, scientists last year used eDNA gathered from water near a wayward beluga whale that made a rare appearance in Puget Sound to determine it had likely come from the Arctic Ocean. However, the new research on hake is the first to employ eDNA at the large scale necessary to support ocean fishery management.

Stored water samples, such as those from the 2019 survey, also provide a snapshot in time that researchers can analyze later to determine the presence or distribution of other species. Advances in genetic science have made eDNA research possible by allowing scientists to detect and quantify even tiny fragments of DNA. This new genetic data provides new insight into the presence and abundance of species in the environment.

“We are not getting only the target species, we are getting information on all the other species that are out there at the same time,” said Krista Nichols, Genetics and Evolution Program Manager at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and a coauthor of the research. She said she was surprised that eDNA produced such accurate data over such a large area. While the method is unlikely to replace existing survey methods anytime soon, she noted, “It is a powerful tool for understanding marine communities and the food web.”

Also see:

— CBB, Jan. 27, 2022, INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF SALMON INITIATIVE LAUNCHES LARGEST EVER PAN-PACIFIC HIGH SEAS RESEARCH EXPEDITION TO STUDY SALMON https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/international-year-of-salmon-initiative-launches-largest-ever-pan-pacific-high-seas-research-expedition-to-study-salmon/

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine takes center stage, remote areas of the Arctic are thrust to the front row of global impacts to the environment, economics and human security.

In this month’s open-access journal Ambio, scientists from Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks outline the many ways the Arctic’s natural resources, ecosystems and people are tightly connected – both to the eight countries that have land in the Arctic, as well as to global events.

It’s critical, the paper notes, to understand the complexities of tightly bound actions and events of both people and nature, especially in times of crisis – most notably climate change and heated conflict between Russia and western countries.

“The current Russia-Ukraine War has cascading consequences for the Arctic and around the world,” said Jianguo “Jack” Liu, director of MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. “The socioeconomic and environmental impacts go far beyond the war zones.”

The Arctic is at the epicenter of complex and socioeconomic change. Climate change is providing more shipping routes, altering the habitats of critical fish and marine life on which indigenous communities depend for subsistence, and even facilitating the phenomenon of “last-chance” tourism. Increased access to and extraction of natural resources, such as oil and natural gas, holds the potential for both positive and negative outcomes.

And since the Arctic contains eight countries, with Russia and the United States being key players, the dynamic connections between human activity, nature and politics are intensifying.

“The crisis in Europe has directly impacted Arctic oil and gas development as well as Arctic regional and global shipping,” said Lawson Brigham, researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The complex linkages of the Arctic to the globe have never been more apparent.”.

Researchers applied the framework of metacoupling, a relatively new way of looking at complex systems holistically to understand socioeconomic and environmental interactions and influences both near and far. In several key areas of the paper, the authors reveal how Russia is deeply involved:

–Oil and gas development. Russian investment in and development oil and gas exports have played a substantial role in shaping economic trajectories as well as vessel traffic patterns in the Arctic. Already, sanctions placed on Russia have slowed or halted development.

–Commercial fisheries. Pacific cod, for example, are harvested from neighboring regions of Alaska and Russia, yet are managed independently by each national government. This poses a threat to the sustainability of fish populations in the long term.

–Wildlife management. Chukchi Sea polar bears are co-managed by indigenous communities and representatives from the United States and Russia, who share knowledge and update policies to ensure the sustainability of this sub-population.

–Increased shipping traffic. As Arctic Sea ice declines, marine traffic has increased due to greater access and longer seasons of navigation – partly as Russia delivers more natural gas and oil to Asian and European markets, as well as other traffic including marine tourism. With these new marine operations can come noise pollution, introduction of invasive species, and injury or death to large marine mammals.

“In times of global challenges, it’s going to be important to be aware that Arctic communities and ecosystems affect and are affected by events both near and far. Considering these connections is critical if we hope to steer the course of the future towards sustainability,” said Kelly Kapsar, an MSU-CSIS PhD candidate and lead author of the paper.

NOAA Fisheries has approved a Habitat Conservation Plan and Safe Harbor Agreement with California’s largest owner of private forestlands to protect habitat for salmon and steelhead.

Sierra Pacific Industries is the largest private forest landowner in the state of California, with about 1.8 million acres of timberland throughout the northern and central portions of the state. Rivers and streams on the company’s land in the Trinity River and Sacramento River basins provide habitat for salmon and steelhead species listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Safe Harbor Agreements are an important model for endangered species conservation and recovery. They engage the support of landowners who are critical to species recovery. Participating landowners voluntarily undertake activities on their property to enhance, restore, or maintain habitat benefiting ESA-listed species. In return, they receive assurances that they will not face new restrictions on their land because of their good stewardship practices.

Sierra Pacific Industries will carry out various conservation measures to support salmon and steelhead recovery. Actions include:

–Reducing erosion through road improvement projects

–Enhancing watershed resiliency by identifying and implementing projects designed to reduce wildfire behavior, intensity, and magnitude

SPI’s role and overall objective is ensuring streams and other wetlands on their lands continue to provide cold, clean water to salmon and steelhead habitat. They have also committed to maintaining the high-quality habitats identified in NOAA Fisheries’ recovery plans as being essential for ESA-listed species conservation and recovery.

“When SPI approached us about collaborating, we knew there were real gains to be made on all sides. We value such conservation-minded partners who share our commitment and desire to conserve at-risk salmon and steelhead,” said Cathy Marcinkevage, Assistant Regional Administrator in NOAA Fisheries’ California Central Valley Office. “We especially note the consideration of creative ways to contribute towards the recovery of salmon in the area. In particular, SPI’s work to maintain and improve upstream habitat, which will help advance NOAA Fisheries’ priority actions of reintroducing populations of listed salmon to their historic spawning grounds.”

The partnership has been almost 5 years in the making.

“Our work with NOAA Fisheries reflects our shared understanding that wildlife conservation and sustainable forestry management—combined with sound science—go hand in hand,” said Sierra Pacific Industries Vice President of Resources Dan Tomascheski. “We work to ensure our forests provide habitat features that support salmon, steelhead and other wildlife. This kind of conservation partnership maintains and produces thriving wildlife populations, while also providing SPI with the needed assurance to continue investing in our operations in a manner that provides for jobs, renewable forest products, recreation, and clean water and air.”

NOAA Fisheries notes that recovery of endangered fish populations in California cannot be achieved without re-establishing populations back into their historical habitats. Reintroducing these species into their native habitat is vital to support healthy, resilient populations.

Barriers such as dams have cut off salmon from 95 percent of their historical habitat. Numerous watersheds on lands owned by SPI in the Sacramento River and Trinity River basins are upstream of these barriers. They are no longer accessible to salmon and steelhead. These areas include historically occupied habitats that are necessary for the successful reintroduction of ESA-listed species proposed in recovery plans.

Species planned for reintroduction in the Sacramento River Basin include Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley spring-run Chinook salmon, and California Central Valley steelhead. In the Trinity River Basin, we have proposed reintroduction of Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast coho salmon.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking additional help marking more than 110 million hatchery salmon and steelhead to identify them as hatchery fish before being released into state waters in 2022.

WDFW’s mass-marking program has played a vital role in salmon management since the mid-1990s. Hatchery fish are marked by clipping their adipose fin while still in the fry stage, before being released to make their way from their home waters to the ocean and back. This marking helps differentiate hatchery fish from natural-origin or “wild” fish, playing a key role in fisheries where anglers may encounter salmon stocks or species listed under the Endangered Species Act.

WDFW is currently hiring paid positions to perform this vital work, but staffing in recent years has been challenging, said Eric Kinne, WDFW’s Hatchery Division manager. 

“This work is essential to fishing throughout the state, and critical to salmon conservation efforts,” said Kinne. “We continue working to recruit for these positions, but last year members of the community stepped up in a big way to help us complete this annual effort.”

This work is performed every year for several months in the spring and early summer, at hatchery facilities across Washington. Work is often performed in shifts throughout the day and even on weekends, so there are many opportunities to volunteer. Anyone interested in volunteering at a WDFW hatchery can visit WDFW’s website at https://wdfw.wa.gov/get-involved/volunteer 

Anyone interested in applying for a paid marking position can look for positions in their area and apply through Kelly Services. These temporary, full-time positions pay $16.49 per hour with the ability to start immediately, no experience required and training provided.

WDFW requested additional funding ahead of this year’s legislative session to improve automation of its marking process and fund additional work, but much of the annual marking effort is still done by hand by employees and volunteers working in marking trailers.

“We have 11 million more fish to mark this year than last year, which is great news but also means we need even more help in 2022,” Kinne said. “If this work isn’t completed, it could have big impacts on fisheries in Washington.”

To learn more about WDFW’s mass-marking program, visit https://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/management/hatcheries/mass-marking

Washington fishery managers have unveiled salmon run forecasts for state waters in 2022, with many forecasts looking similar to last year’s predictions, and some slight improvements or declines by area. Columba River fall chinook are forecasted to be well below the 10-year average, with coho double the average.

Several stocks are down and are expected to limit lower river fisheries. The endangered Snake River sockeye run is forecasting only 200 fish and Lake Wenatchee sockeye forecast is below the escapement goal.

Cooperatively developed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and tribal co-managers, these forecasts mark the launching point for the annual North of Falcon process to develop Washington’s salmon fishing seasons. The forecasts cover expected returns of Chinook, coho, sockeye, and chum salmon in Puget Sound, the Columbia River, and Washington’s coastal areas.

The process includes extensive public meetings and opportunities to provide input through early April as WDFW works with the tribes to develop tentative fishing seasons for the upcoming angling year. North of Falcon is just one part of a larger process that includes the state, tribal governments, federal regulators, other U.S. states, and Canada.

Though forecasts for many areas look similar or somewhat improved from 2021’s forecasts, many returns remain below their historical averages and some fisheries will likely continue to see constraints to ensure conservation goals are met for threatened or endangered salmon populations.

The Department continues to work to preserve and restore habitat, address barriers to fish migration, and manage predation, but responsible fishery management remains a key part of salmon conservation efforts, said WDFW Director Kelly Susewind.

 “Fishing is a critical part of Washington’s culture and economy, and we want to make sure people have plenty of opportunity to get out on the water in 2022,” Susewind said. “When we set salmon seasons, we always have to start from a place that ensures this iconic resource will be available for future generations, and that means we sometimes have to make tough decisions in the present.”

The forecasts are based on the latest scientific modeling and a variety of data including environmental indicators such as ocean conditions, numbers of juvenile salmon that migrated to marine waters, and numbers of adult salmon that returned in past years.　

The following are summaries of this year’s forecasts, which vary by area:

Columbia River

About 230,400 “upriver bright” fall Chinook are expected to return to areas of the Columbia River above Bonneville Dam, a slight decrease from the 239,900 that returned in 2021 and well below the 10-year average.

Coho forecasts prior to any river or ocean fisheries occurring, are slightly up from 2021’s return of 829,800 fish, with just under 1 million fish expected to return in 2022, and is more than double than the 10-year average.

“The return of hatchery coho to the Columbia River is expected to be the largest we have seen since 2014, but as always we will have to plan fisheries that meet ESA limits for listed coho, Chinook, sockeye and steelhead,” said Kyle Adicks, WDFW’s intergovernmental salmon manager.

Coho fishing could be impacted if catches of other stocks are higher than anticipated, potentially restricting fishing access in specific areas as happened on a section of the mainstem below Bonneville Dam in 2021.

Sockeye returns to the Columbia are forecast to be up to nearly 200,000, compared to last year’s return of 152,309 fish.  However, several stocks are down and are expected to limit lower river fisheries. The endangered Snake River sockeye run is forecasting only 200 fish and Lake Wenatchee sockeye forecast is below the escapement goal.

Washington’s ocean waters

Coho returns on the Washington coast, meanwhile, are expected to be up significantly over 2021’s forecast. An estimated 454,693 fish are expected to return to coastal areas, up more than 200,000 from last year’s forecast of 241,800 coho. The biggest increases are expected in Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay but returns to many coastal rivers are also expected to improve over 2021.

About 73,000 lower Columbia River “tule” Chinook are expected to return this year, very similar to last year’s forecast. These fish make up a sizeable portion of the recreational ocean fishery. The 2021 return came in slightly above forecast, but still below the 10-year average.

Puget Sound

Coho returns to Puget Sound and surrounding rivers are forecast to be up overall in 2022 over the previous year, at 666,648 wild and hatchery coho. The forecast called for about 615,000 fish in 2021. Continued low returns to some areas — including the Snohomish River, Hood Canal and the Strait of Juan de Fuca — are expected to impact fisheries in the region. North Sound stocks look slightly more positive, including returns to the Nooksack and Skagit rivers.

Puget Sound Chinook are also expected to be up slightly in 2022, reversing a downward trend from recent years. An estimated 250,440 Chinook are expected to return to the Puget Sound region, about 19,000 more than last year’s prediction. Despite this improvement, Adicks said that low returns of some stocks, like those returning to the Stillaguamish River are likely to constrain fisheries.

WDFW and co-managers recently submitted a 10-year Puget Sound Harvest Management Plan, which, if approved, would provide long-term Endangered Species Act coverage for Puget Sound fisheries. While federal regulators consider this plan, WDFW and the tribes expect to use the plan as a framework when developing this year’s salmon seasons in Puget Sound.

Public meetings and feedback opportunities

Information about the salmon season-setting process, including public meeting schedules and materials, are available on WDFW’s website at https://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/management/north-falcon

State, tribal, and federal fishery managers will meet with the Pacific Fishery Management Council March 8-14 to develop options for the year’s commercial and recreational ocean Chinook and coho salmon fisheries. The PFMC establishes fishing seasons in ocean waters 3 to 200 miles off the Pacific coast.

The public is invited to join WDFW at online public meetings throughout March and into April to discuss coastal and regional fishery issues and preferences for Puget Sound and Columbia River. Meetings offer opportunities for public comment, which fisheries managers use to help inform non-tribal fishing seasons.

The PFMC is expected to adopt final ocean fishing seasons and regional harvest levels for the western seaboard at a meeting spanning April 6-13. State and tribal co-managers will set a tentative 2022 salmon fisheries package for Washington’s inside waters.

The U.S. Geological Survey selected the Willamette River Basin in the Pacific Northwest as the latest location for an in-depth examination of factors affecting water supply and demand.  

The Willamette River Basin is the fourth in a series of at least ten Integrated Water Science basin studies planned by USGS nationwide. Nested between Oregon’s Coast and Cascades Ranges, the river flows north through a fertile agricultural valley that is also home to two-thirds of Oregon’s population.

The basin was chosen because its hydrologic and environmental setting is representative of the challenges faced by conflicting water demands between humans and ecosystems—particularly salmon—throughout the entire Pacific Northwest.   

— CBB, March 3, 2022, CORPS RELEASES FIRST COURT-ORDERED WILLAMETTE BASIN STATUS REPORT ON IMPROVING CONDITIONS FOR SALMON, STEELHEAD AT NUMEROUS DAMS

— CBB, Feb. 10, 2022, CORPS SAYS COURT’S SALMON/STEELHEAD PROTECTIVE ORDER WILL IMPACT WILLAMETTE VALLEY RESERVOIR REFILLS, RECREATION

“The integrated nature of river health and real-world water management is well represented by the Willamette River Basin. It supports major cities, fertile agriculture, and ecologically important species such as salmon, making it an ideal location to develop better science for future decisions that will affect both the environment and peoples of the region,” said Tanya Trujillo, Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science.  

The USGS Integrated Water Science Basin studies date back to the 2009 SECURE Water Act, which directed the USGS to establish a national water availability assessment. Each Integrated Water Science basin is selected to represent a wide range of environmental, hydrologic, and landscape settings and human stressors of water resources to improve understanding of water availability across the nation.

The other three basins studied to date include the Delaware River Basin, the Upper Colorado River Basin, and the Illinois River Basin. 

The USGS will use regionally focused innovative data collection, research, and modeling, such as the Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS), to provide high-fidelity, real-time data on water quantity, quality, and use. An Integrated Water Availability Assessment (IWAA) will provide a near-real-time census of the status, trends and forecasts of the amount of surface water and groundwater available to support various uses in the basin. 

The USGS chose the Willamette River Basin based on a rigorous quantitative ranking that indicated it would be ideal for advancing the science used to manage the amount and quality of available water to diverse needs. The basin’s wide array of landscapes run the gamut from rural to urban, from forested to farmed. It is fed by diverse stream types, supporting varied aquatic ecosystems which are home to threatened and endangered species.

In particular, the studies will focus on applied science that can help balance human needs for water management such as flood control, water supply, recreation with the need to maintain ecological sustainability. 

“Integration of USGS monitoring, research, and modeling in the Willamette River Basin will support innovation around issues that are common to many river systems of the Pacific Northwest. For example, we expect to it to bolster our scientific understanding of seasonal variation in precipitation, groundwater-surface water interactions, snowpack influence on summer low flows, watershed response to severe fire, and harmful algal bloom prediction,” said Don Cline, USGS Associate Director for Water.  

USGS will begin evaluating existing knowledge gaps and consulting stakeholders in the spring of 2022. For more information about Integrated Water Science Basins, visit: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/integrated-water-science-iws-basins

Martha Williams has been sworn in as Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. Williams has been serving as Principal Deputy Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service since January 20, 2021, exercising the delegable authority of the Director.

“Martha’s decades of experience in conservation, wildlife management, and natural resources stewardship have been a crucial asset as the Department of the Interior tackles the dual climate and biodiversity crises,” said Secretary Haaland. “Her strategic vision and collaborative approach will be key in her role as Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and as the Department works to conserve, connect, and restore America’s lands, waters and wildlife for current and future generations.”

“It’s an incredible honor to serve the American people as Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service at a time when the challenges and opportunities to maintain healthy ecosystems and wildlife have never been greater. I look forward to continuing my life’s work of collaborating with local communities and stakeholders to tackle conservation efforts and the tough wildlife and resource management issues facing the country,” said Williams.

As Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams will play a critical role in implementing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $1.4 billion investment in ecosystem restoration and resilience, which will help restore America’s lands, and fund stewardship contracts, ecosystem restoration projects, invasive species detection and prevention, and native vegetation restoration efforts.

Prior to joining the Biden-Harris administration, Williams served as the Director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks from 2017 to 2020. Previously, Martha was an Assistant Professor of Law at the Blewett School of Law at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana where she co-directed the university’s Land Use and Natural Resources Clinic.

Williams served as Deputy Solicitor for Parks and Wildlife between 2011 and 2013, providing counsel to the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a juris doctor degree from the University of Montana School of Law.

By Nat Johnson and Dr. Kai-Chih Tseng

This past December, a mind-boggling 18 feet of snowfall fell in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains! How does so much snow fall in one place in such a short period of time? One of the primary phenomena responsible for such extreme rain and snowfall, particularly in regions like the western U.S., is the atmospheric river. Like their terrestrial counterparts, atmospheric rivers carry tremendous amounts of water over thousands of miles. These aerial versions, however, often bring both severe disruption and great benefit through the heavy rain and mountain snows that they produce.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow corridors of moisture-laden air extending from the tropics to higher latitudes. They can produce heavy rain and snowfall in short periods of time, especially when the air is lifted over high terrain, cooling the air and condensing the moisture into droplets, like wringing out an atmospheric sponge. When you see these impressively long features on satellite imagery, it’s no wonder that they are compared to rivers. In fact, an average atmospheric river carries 25 times the amount of water as the Mississippi River!

They form when warm, moist air in lower latitudes is transported poleward like a conveyor belt ahead of a trailing cold front from a powerful mid-latitude storm. Around the globe, atmospheric rivers are responsible for more than 90% of the water vapor that is transported to the mid-latitudes from the tropics and are a critical source of water for many regions, such as California and Nevada. They also can be quite destructive, causing severe flooding and damaging winds, with the strongest atmospheric rivers in the western U.S. typically causing damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Several notable atmospheric rivers have made landfall along the West Coast of the U.S. this past fall and winter. On October 24-25, 2021, an intense atmospheric river brought high winds and historic rain reaching up to a foot to the San Francisco Bay region, providing a temporary reprieve from an enduring drought (but clearly not enough to end it). The animation above shows the narrow, river-like corridor of concentrated water vapor that resulted in this historic rainfall.

California is no stranger to this “boom or bust” precipitation pattern. Incredibly, up to half of the annual precipitation in parts of California falls in just 5 to 10 wet days during the year (is it any wonder that seasonal prediction of precipitation is so hard?), and atmospheric rivers are a major source of those few wet days. California is unique in terms of such extreme precipitation variability, but other western states, like Washington and Oregon, also rely on atmospheric rivers for water supply.

Atmospheric rivers occur throughout much of the globe outside of the tropics and in all seasons, but they are most frequent in the storm tracks in the vicinity of jet streams. Their impacts on the U.S. are most pronounced in winter. The figure above shows that in a typical December–February period, atmospheric rivers near North America occur most often offshore in the North Pacific and North Atlantic. Although their importance is emphasized in the western U.S. because of their large contribution to annual rain and snow totals, they also frequently occur in central and eastern U.S. states, where we can expect approximately 10 winter days each year with an atmospheric river occurrence.

Don’t worry, we didn’t forget about the role of ENSO! Just as ENSO impacts the seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns over North America, it also affects the frequency of landfalling atmospheric rivers. Over the past 30 years, El Niño has brought more frequent than normal West Coast landfalling atmospheric rivers, whereas La Niña generally has brought less frequent occurrences. This winter has been pretty consistent with typical La Niña conditions, with below-average western U.S. atmospheric river activity. Despite a two-week period in December that brought atmospheric rivers and record snow to California, January was the second driest on record in California and Nevada.

But how well can we predict atmospheric rivers?

As with all extreme precipitation events, accurate forecasts of individual atmospheric rivers and their impacts are limited to short-range weather forecasts. However, the latest research efforts are advancing our ability to predict regional atmospheric river activity (not individual storms) on subseasonal (roughly 2-4 weeks in advance) and even seasonal time horizons.

On subseasonal timescales, the sources of atmospheric river predictability are rooted in large-scale climate patterns such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation and the Pacific-North American Pattern. On the seasonal side, a recent study led by guest co-author Dr. Kai-Chih Tseng indicates that one of the models participating in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME), SPEAR, can produce skillful seasonal forecasts of atmospheric river activity over some regions, including coastal California and Alaska, up to nine months in advance. The guiding hand of ENSO is one of the main reasons that seasonal atmospheric river forecasts may be possible.

Human-caused climate change is likely to increase atmospheric river intensity. Warming oceans lead to increasing available moisture for these powerful storms, enhancing the moisture transport and heavy precipitation that they produce. While several global climate model studies support the increasing intensity of atmospheric rivers with global warming, additional study is needed to better understand how other atmospheric river properties, like size, shape, frequency, and location, will change.

The bottom line is that any increase in atmospheric river intensity will contribute to the growing water resource challenges in the western U.S. Therefore, we can expect that improving our understanding and our ability to predict atmospheric rivers across a range of timescales will remain a major scientific priority.

Nat Johnson is with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Dr. Kai-Chih Tseng is a postdoctoral research scientist at Princeton University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who is an expert on climate variability and prediction, including the study of atmospheric rivers. In the summer of 2022, Dr. Tseng will begin an assistant professor position in the Department of Atmospheric Science at National Taiwan University.

This article first appeared in the Climate.gov ENSO Blog https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso

Hatchery crews at Hoodsport Hatchery on Washington state’s Hood Canal identified a loss of more than 3.5 million chum salmon fry early Monday morning following extreme flooding that resulted in significant debris in the hatchery’s water intake system.

The incident coincided with an atmospheric river that prompted active flood warnings for the nearby Skokomish River. With standby hatchery staff responding to equipment alarms throughout the night, the debris ultimately resulted in inadequate flows to hatchery incubation trays.

WDFW is analyzing the incident and will take appropriate actions to mitigate future incidents at Hoodsport Hatchery.

“Our hatchery crews are deeply committed to the health and well-being of these fish and the fisheries they support,” said Joe Coutu, WDFW hatchery operations manager for Hood Canal and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “We are disappointed by this loss alongside anglers, tribal co-managers and communities that depend on fishing.”

Hoodsport Hatchery is one of two other WDFW hatcheries that support Hood Canal chum production. This loss accounts for about 9 percent of planned Hood Canal chum salmon releases between WDFW’s Hoodsport and McKernan hatcheries. Hatchery crews will backfill the loss with surplus fry from McKernan hatchery.

This year’s release keeps pace with historic Hood Canal chum fry releases over the last 10 years. These fry were planned for release in April 2022. Other fish species raised at the Hoodsport Hatchery include fall Chinook and pink salmon, none of which this event impacted.

WDFW operates 80 hatcheries across Washington and raises about 48.4 million chum salmon fry annually.

Conservation and animal-protection groups announced a combined $22,500 reward this week for information leading to a conviction in the killing of a collared wolf outside the town of Cove in northeast Oregon.

On Feb. 15 Oregon State Police troopers, investigating a report from wildlife officials, found a collared wolf lying dead in a field. The troopers believe the black female wolf to be OR-109, who had been shot and killed that morning.

This killing follows 2021’s fatal poisoning of eight wolves in the same area of the state and another similar killing by firearm in January 2022, making this the 10th illegal killing over the past year alone. The combined reward offered by conservation groups for the killings totals at least $66,500.

“This onslaught of wolf killings in Oregon is deeply upsetting,” said Sophia Ressler, an Oregon-based staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to find the poacher and hold them accountable for killing this precious wolf. We have a wolf-poaching crisis on our hands, and Oregon officials must take strong action.”

“Oregon’s wolf-poaching crisis is reaching a critical level,” said Kelly Peterson, Oregon state director at the Humane Society of the United States. “The death of OR-109 at the hands of a poacher is infuriating, especially given all of the other losses Oregon’s precious few wolves have suffered over the past two years. While this reward cannot bring her back, we hope it brings these cruel actors to justice and helps finally put an end to the illegal slaughter of our wolves.”

Anyone with information about any of these cases should contact the Oregon State Police TIP line at (800) 452-7888 or *OSP (677) or by e-mail at TIP@state.or.us. Callers may remain anonymous.

In Washington state, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is inviting the public to submit written comment from Feb. 22 to April 11, 2022 on a proposed rule change and a new rule to address wolf-livestock conflict deterrence.

In September 2020, Gov. Jay Inslee directed WDFW to initiate rule making with the goal of instituting practices that would reduce the number of livestock killed or injured by wolves as well as the number of wolves lethally removed as a result of depredations of domestic animals.

The proposed rule change, if adopted, would amend the language of Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 220-440-080 to require that, to authorize lethal removal of wolves, the WDFW director (or WDFW staff designee) would need to confirm an owner of domestic animals has proactively implemented appropriate non-lethal conflict deterrence measures.

The proposal, if adopted, would also create a new rule (WAC 220-440-260) that directs WDFW staff, in consultation with willing, affected livestock producers, as well as affected federal, state, and tribal agencies, to author conflict mitigation plans that would establish area-specific criteria for the use of non-lethal and lethal measures to mitigate wolf-livestock conflict in areas of chronic conflict.

“If adopted, the proposed change to WAC 220-440-080 would align the code with the agency’s long-standing commitment to non-lethal conflict mitigation strategies,” said Wolf Policy Lead Julia Smith.

“The proposal creating WAC 220-440-260 aims to address areas that have experienced significant levels of livestock depredation and subsequent wolf removals year after year, an especially difficult scenario for all communities concerned about wolf conservation and management. This proposal focuses limited time and resources to areas where the most livestock and wolf loss has occurred in the state.”

In addition, a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that analyzes the environmental impacts of four alternative rule making options and a Small Business Economic Impact Statement that evaluates the potential costs to businesses in the livestock industry resulting from the proposed rule and rule change were developed as part of the rule making process.

During this public comment period, WDFW is looking for input https://publicinput.com/U0420#0

on the draft proposed language for both WACs, as well as feedback on the DSEIS.

More information on wolves in Washington can be found at https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/at-risk/species-recovery/gray-wolf

Interesting things are happening in Oregon’s Willamette River basin when it comes to salmon and steelhead recovery. Maybe even a little overlooked for their significance. An Oregon federal judge is running the river, issuing significant directions for how federal dams and reservoirs should be operated to benefit fish.

And that’s what happens when populations of naturally producing salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act start approaching extinction. Entities worried about the decline of the fish sue. And they win.

Then what? In the Columbia/Snake River basin, the 20 years of legal battles over the federal hydropower system’s impacts on salmon and steelhead have typically led to judges ordering “remands.” Kick it back to the agencies for a do over, and here we go again.

Not so for the mighty Willamette River, the Columbia’s largest tributary west of the Snake River. A judge is telling the Army Corps of Engineers it needs to take action to assist faltering salmon and steelhead NOW, not in some distance future. And with the help of an advisory panel, orders are being issued and followed now, not later.

The Willamette is a troubled, polluted river winding south-north through urban Oregon, flowing into the Columbia at Portland. Yet, its tributaries include beautiful salmon/steelhead bearing rivers, with excellent high country salmonid habitat above dams and reservoirs.

Three species of wild Willamette River fish are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act — bull trout, Upper Willamette River spring chinook salmon and Upper Willamette River winter steelhead. A series of 13 Willamette Project dams block access to upstream spawning grounds.

In August, 2020, Judge Marco Hernandez, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Oregon, ruled the Corps was not moving fast enough to ensure survival and recovery of the wild spring chinook and wild winter steelhead. “Far short of moving towards recovery, the Corps is pushing the UWR Chinook and steelhead even closer to the brink of extinction. The record demonstrates that the listed salmonids are in a more precarious condition today than they were at the time NMFS issued the 2008 BiOp.”

The conservation groups who sued the Corps were alarmed by the rapidly dwindling numbers of salmon and steelhead and the ongoing delays in mitigating action. The court ruled in favor of the groups on all of their claims.

And now the judge is playing a substantial role in how these federal dams are operated. Already he has ordered:

• Deep reservoir drawdowns at Cougar Dam on the South Fork of the McKenzie River and at Fall Creek Dam on the Middle Fork Willamette to aid downstream migration of juvenile salmon and steelhead;

• Spring spill at Foster Dam on the South Santiam River to aid juvenile downstream migration;

• Adult outplanting, spring spill and juvenile passage at Green Peter Dam on the Middle Fork Santiam River;

• Spring spill and the use of regulating outlets at Lookout Point Dam on the Middle Fork Willamette River;

• Use of temperature control outlets at Detroit and Big Cliff dams on the North Fork Santiam River.

That’s no small potatoes. And it wouldn’t be happening without a judge.

In his 2020 ruling, Hernandez was blunt. “The reason the dams adversely affect salmonid migration is straightforward: Significant portions of the UWR Chinook and steelhead spawning habitat are located above the (Willamette Valley Projects) dams and salmonids cannot swim past dams, at least without operational and structural measures to facilitate such passage. Approximately 70% of historic UWR Chinook and 33% of UWR steelhead spawning, incubation, and rearing habitat in the North Santiam River and South Santiam River subbasins is blocked by dams. Approximately 16% of historic UWR Chinook habitat in the McKenzie River subbasin is blocked by dams. Over 90% of the historic habitat for UWR Chinook has been blocked by dams in the Middle Fork Willamette River subbasin.”

“The dams also adversely affect water quality, quantity, and temperature below the dams, and change the nature of the waterways above the dams in a variety of ways that can affect the ability of juvenile salmon to develop and survive downstream migration and the ability of adult salmonids to migrate upstream and spawn,” Hernandez wrote in his opinion.

The Willamette situation harkens back to another years-long legal imbroglio that forced judges to issue orders to save a Northwest species not being helped in other ways.

Remember the spotted owl?

The federal forests of the Pacific Northwest contain the last remaining pre-settlement “old growth” forests in the lower 48. The northern spotted owl, was designated by the Forest Service as a management indicator species for this habitat. The old growth areas’ streams are utilized by imperiled salmon runs. Preserving the old growth forests became the focal effort of environmental and recreational interests.

On the other side, the percentage of timber harvested from federal as opposed to state and private lands was comparatively large in these areas, creating dependency in the local economy on its availability. The stage was set for major conflict.

Eventually, judges ordered the Forest Service to halt further timber sales in spotted owl habitat in Washington, Oregon and Northern California until standards and guidelines ensuring the owl’s viability were in place.

Until the Northwest Forest Plan was finally approved by the courts, judges were running the woods.

Parties to the Columbia/Snake River basin long-running salmon/steelhead litigation are now in talks in Oregon District Court Judge Michael Simon’s court, aiming for some kind of settlement this summer.

If litigants and regional parties cannot agree on a plan to keep certain populations of ESA-listed salmon and steelhead from going functionally extinct, will a judge someday soon be ordering changes to the operations of the Columbia/Snake federal hydropower system, similar to what Hernandez is doing in the Willamette? Will a judge be running the river?

That’s a likely outcome. Hernandez was done with the foot dragging in the Willamette. Not hard to imagine another judge feeling the same way about the Columbia/Snake River.

— Bill Crampton, billcrampton@bendcable.com

For background on this issue, see:

— CBB, February 10, 2022, “Corps Says Courts Salmon/Steelhead Protective Order Will Impact Willamette Valley Reservoir Refills, Recreation,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/corps-says-courts-salmon-steelhead-protective-order-will-impact-willamette-valley-reservoir-refills-recreation2/

— CBB, January 27, 2022, “Corps Evaluating EIS Alternatives For Potential Survival Improvements At Willamette Valley Dams For ESA-Listed Salmon, Steelhead,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/corps-evaluating-eis-alternatives-for-potential-survival-improvements-at-willamette-valley-dams-for-esa-listed-salmon-steelhead/

— CBB, December 16, 2021, “Court Approves Interim Actions For Aiding ESA-Listed Willamette Valley Salmon, Steelhead; Ninth Circuit Appeal Possible,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/court-approves-interim-actions-for-aiding-esa-listed-willamette-valley-salmon-steelhead-ninth-circuit-appeal-possible/

— CBB, September 2, 2021, “Judge Issues Final Order For Operations At Corps’ Willamette Valley Dams To Aid ESA Salmon, Steelhead; Deep Drawdowns, Spill,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/judge-issue-final-order-for-operations-at-corps-willamette-valley-dams-to-aid-esa-salmon-steelhead-deep-drawdowns-spill/

— CBB, August 26, 2021, “Willamette River Reservoirs Far Below Average As Parties Move Forward On Court-Ordered Interim Measures To Address Listed Steelhead, Chinook,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/willamette-river-reservoirs-far-below-average-as-parties-move-forward-on-court-ordered-interim-measures-to-address-listed-steelhead-chinook/

— CBB, July 15, 2021, “Federal Judge Orders Corps To Take Immediate Action To Protect ESA-Listed Willamette Valley Wild Spring Chinook, Steelhead; ‘No Patience For Further Delay,’” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/federal-judge-orders-corps-to-take-immediate-action-to-protect-esa-listed-willamette-valley-wild-spring-chinook-steelhead-no-patience-for-further-delay/

— CBB, November 12, 2020, “Corps Modifies Operations At Willamette Valley Dam To Improve Juvenile Salmon Passage As Court Case Continues On ‘Remedies’ For Wild Salmon/Steelhead,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/corps-modifies-operations-at-willamette-valley-dam-to-improve-juvenile-salmon-passage-as-court-case-continues-on-remedies-for-wild-salmon-steelhead/

— CBB, August 19, 2020, “Federal Judge Rules Corps Not Moving Fast Enough To Halt Continued Decline of ESA-Listed Upper Willamette River Wild Spring Chinook/Steelhead; ‘Significant Measures Never Carried Out,’” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/federal-judge-rules-corps-not-moving-fast-enough-to-halt-continued-decline-of-esa-listed-upper-willamette-river-wild-spring-chinook-steelhead-significant-measures-never-carried-out/

— CBB, November 21, 2019, “NOAA Says Corps’ Draft Proposal On Managing Willamette Dams/Reservoirs Likely To Jeopardize Salmon, Steelhead,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/noaa-says-corps-draft-proposal-on-managing-willamette-dams-reservoirs-likely-to-jeopardize-salmon-steelhead/

— CBB, May 30, 2019, “Details On Proposed Detroit Dam Water Temperature Control Tower, Fish Passage Facility To Boost ESA-Listed Steelhead, Spring Chinook,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/details-on-proposed-detroit-dam-water-temperature-control-tower-fish-passage-facility-to-boost-esa-listed-steelhead-spring-chinook/

— CBB, April 6, 2019, “Court Hears Arguments For Immediate Changes At Willamette Dams To Aid ESA-Listed Salmonids,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/court-hears-arguments-for-immediate-changes-at-willamette-dams-to-aid-esa-listed-salmonids/

— CBB, March 15, 2019, “Corps Proposal For Downstream Fish Passage At McKenzie River’s Cougar Dam Out For Review,” https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/corps-proposal-for-downstream-fish-passage-at-mckenzie-rivers-cougar-dam-out-for-review/

Abnormally low water this time of year in south coast streams is leaving native fish and redds vulnerable to disturbance. Wild winter steelhead are just starting to spawn while fall chinook fry are leaving their redds and emerging from stream gravel.

Biologists surveying wild winter steelhead spawning report an uptick of recreationists driving across creeks and streams and landowners cleaning up native streamside vegetation. This is attributed to the warm, dry weather.

Normally at this time of year, water flows would be much higher, and it would be raining. People would not be driving across streams or maintaining streamside vegetation.

Flows now are typical of late spring said district fish biologist Steve Mazur. He is concerned about people disturbing spawning fish and redds that are now being exposed due to low water.

Driving across streams can destroy the redds and fry and lower water quality by stirring up silt and gravel. Native streamside vegetation keeps streams cooler, provides cover for the fry, and stabilizes the riparian area.

Mazur asks coastal residents and visitors to help preserve wild fish by not driving ATVs or vehicles across streams. He also asks landowners to leave native streamside vegetation.

Mazur said winter steelhead spawn in south coast streams until early May. Spawning surveys continue through April.

The winter steelhead spawning surveys are a monitoring action included in the newly adopted Rogue-South Coast Multispecies Conservation and Management Plan.

Whether the lower Snake River dams should be breached to revive flagging wild salmon and steelhead runs is certainly a top regional issue. And what the impacts would be to the Northwest power supply is a key factor in the breach/no breach debate.

For, against, or undecided, one would want to know with confidence the energy implications of either mothballing these four sources of hydropower or keeping them humming for the foreseeable future.

The lower Snake River dams currently provide about 4 percent of the Northwest’s electricity. With breaching, could that lost power be easily replaced without increasing regional carbon emissions? If not, why not?

The organization with the skills to tell us these answers — to thoroughly, objectively analyze the power supply implications of breaching — is the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

Indeed, as dam-breaching hovers as a fundamental flash point in Columbia Basin salmon recovery, the Council next week is expected to approve a 20-year power plan for the region. Yet, the draft plan includes no analysis of the power supply implications of knocking the four Lower Snake dams offline.

That’s too bad. In my view, such analysis is what the Council was born to do. Many others feel the same way. Nearly 40 percent of the comments received on the draft plan said, with varying perspectives, that the 20-year power plan should address the power supply implications of Lower Snake River dam breaching.

The Council is at the nexus of salmon recovery and energy production. The power plan, in fact, includes the regional Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program intended to guide entities charged with mitigating the impacts of federal dams on protected salmonids.

One of the Council’s primary responsibilities, along with developing a fish and wildlife program, is to craft this 20-year power plan for the Pacific Northwest and update it at least every five years. The plan includes an electricity demand forecast, electricity and natural gas price forecasts, an assessment of the amount of cost-effective energy efficiency that can be acquired over the term of the plan, and a “least-cost” resources portfolio.

Much of the plan is basically a prognosis of long-term future energy needs. But the Council’s draft plan, set for final approval next week, avoids the dam-breaching issue.

“There are as yet no planned retirement dates for any mainstem dams on the Snake and Columbia,” says the draft plan. “So, the Council does not need to analyze the effects of the retirement of those plants for this power plan in order to develop the power plan’s new resource strategy and fit that strategy to the existing if changing power system. And it is not the Council’s task under the (Northwest Power) Act, in the power planning process, to analyze or recommend the retirement of existing system resources.”

I get that. Except that it’s a power plan looking 20 years out. A coming twenty years of continued warming waters, less snowpack and, yes, potential extinction of Snake/Salmon River basin wild salmon and steelhead. And the system resource – the Lower Snake River dams – is going to be a flashpoint, one way or another, that entire 20 years.

Even though Council members chose in their draft power plan to proceed with no analysis of the power supply implications of Lower Snake dam removal, it does recognize a need at some point.

“There may be value to the region in having the Council analyze the power system effects of the retirement of those dams,” says the draft plan.  “Such an analysis could provide information to decision makers considering the future of the projects. “

Seems to me that time is now. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray have pledged an assessment of whether and how to best replace the benefits of the dams, scheduled to be completed this summer. And the parties involved in litigation over the Columbia River basin Environmental Impact Statement/Biological Opinion for salmon and steelhead are in talks now, with hopes of presenting a collaborative product to the federal court within months. No doubt the lower Snake dams are at the center of those negotiations.

Considering these fast-moving developments, and the fact that energy planning and salmon recovery are inextricably linked in the Columbia River Basin, the Council, built for both power and fish, would be doing the region a service by analyzing how to replace the energy from the lower Snake River dams should they be breached to avoid extinction of wild Snake River basin salmon and steelhead.

— Bill Crampton, billcrampton@bendcable.com

Also see:

— CBB, Dec. 16, 2021, SHOULD THE NORTHWEST’S NEW 20-YEAR POWER PLAN INCLUDE ANALYSIS OF LOWER SNAKE DAM REMOVAL? SOME SAY YES, SOME NO https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/should-the-northwests-new-20-year-power-plan-include-analysis-of-lower-snake-dam-removal-some-say-yes-some-no/

— CBB, Sept. 30, 2021, DRAFT POWER PLAN SAYS RELYING MORE ON RENEWABLES COULD IMPACT FLOWS, FISH IN COLUMBIA/SNAKE RIVER; CALLS FOR FURTHER STUDY https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/draft-power-plan-says-relying-more-on-renewables-could-impact-flows-fish-in-columbia-snake-river-calls-for-further-study/

— CBB, Dec. 9, 2021, EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: AS WE END THE YEAR, BIG DECISIONS FOR COLUMBIA RIVER BASIN SALMON RECOVERY DANGLE ON HOLD https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/editors-notebook-as-we-end-the-year-big-decisions-for-columbia-river-basin-salmon-recovery-dangle-on-hold/

(This column is adapted from a longer piece published in the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission Newsletter.)

By Gregory T. Ruggerone (Natural Resources Consultants, Inc.), James R. Irvine (Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Pacific Biological Station), and Brendan Connors (Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences)

At the Third NPAFC-IYS Virtual Workshop on Linkages between Pacific Salmon Production and Environmental Changes that took place in May 2021, we hypothesized that an overabundance of salmon, combined with effects of recent marine heat waves, may have been responsible for unexpectedly low returns of all five species of Pacific salmon across the North Pacific in 2020.

We were subsequently invited to provide this updated summary of our report for the NPAFC Newsletter so that our findings could reach a broader audience. We hope that our article, which includes updated and preliminary estimates of commercial catch for 2021, will stimulate further discussions about the interactions of salmon at sea, especially in light of the dynamic and shifting ocean environment in which they live.

Since everyone wants more salmon, the question “Are there too many salmon in the North Pacific Ocean?” might seem odd. However, it is worth considering the potential effects of healthy and abundant salmon populations that often migrate thousands of kilometers at sea where they intermingle and compete with distant depleted populations for prey.

It is not surprising that fishery managers are primarily concerned with maintaining those populations that return to regions they manage with little consideration for how these populations might adversely affect other salmon. Likewise, hatchery managers release large numbers of juvenile salmon to maximize harvests in nearby salmon fisheries, often with little consideration for, or understanding of, potential competition effects on other distant salmon populations that compete for the same common pool of resources at sea.

The numbers of Pacific salmon surviving to adulthood increased following the 1977 ocean regime shift, peaking in 2018 when approximately 950 million pink, chum, and sockeye salmon returned from the ocean. This increase was likely the result of favorable ocean conditions combined with the release of large numbers of hatchery-origin juvenile salmon. Releases of hatchery salmon into the North Pacific reached approximately 5.5 billion juvenile salmon in 2019, a sharp increase since the 1960s when approximately 0.6 billion hatchery salmon were released each year. Approximately 40% of the total salmon biomass in the Pacific during 1990 to 2015 was made up of hatchery salmon, especially chum and pink salmon. Clearly hatchery salmon are now key components of the epipelagic North Pacific Ocean. Then in 2020, the harvest of Pacific salmon unexpectedly and precipitously declined. We wanted to know why.

In 2019, salmon abundance remained exceptionally high (~854 million salmon). Together the 2018/2019 period was the highest two-year period of salmon abundance on record since 1925, nearly 20% greater than the previous two-year high in 2009/2010, and more than 3.2 times higher than average abundance during relatively low salmon production years from 1960 to 1975.

Pink salmon dominate the abundance of Pacific salmon returning from the North Pacific, reaching approximately 700 million maturing fish in 2018 and nearly 640 million fish in 2019. The exceptional return in 2018 was highly unusual because pink salmon abundance is typically highest in odd-numbered years.

Approximately 88% and 68% of the total pink salmon abundance were from Asia in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In contrast, peak abundance of pink salmon in North America occurred in 2013 and 2015 (more than 300 million fish per year). Overall, pink salmon represented approximately 74% of total salmon abundance in 2018/2019.

Most pink salmon are of natural origin, but abundance of hatchery pink salmon during 2005 to 2015 was greater than abundance of wild chum salmon and approximately equal to abundance of wild sockeye salmon. Total chum and sockeye salmon represented only 14% and 12%, respectively, of total salmon abundance in 2018/2019. These values exclude Chinook and coho salmon, whose combined reported commercial catch was 1.5% of total salmon catch from the North Pacific during 2018/2019 and approximately 5% of total salmon catch, on average, during 1925 to 2020.

The high abundance of Pacific salmon in recent decades came to an abrupt end in 2020. Commercial catch statistics for all salmon species indicate Pacific salmon harvests, which provide an index of abundance, declined more in 2020 than in any other year on record since 1930. Commercial salmon catch declined by approximately 187 million fish compared with average catch during the previous 10 years. Although the COVID-19 pandemic likely reduced commercial catch to some extent in some regions, most fishery reports and preliminary escapement estimates indicate that low abundance rather than harvest reductions from the COVID-19 pandemic were primarily responsible for the unusually low catch in 2020.

The following details illustrate the issue of commercial catch declines in 2020 for each species. Harvests of each species of Pacific salmon declined 35%, on average, in 2020 when compared with the previous 10-year average. Harvests of Chinook salmon in 2020 were the lowest on record since 1925, declining 54% compared with the previous ten years. Chum salmon harvests in 2020 declined 42%, followed by pink (-40%), coho (-27%), and sockeye salmon (-10%).

Sockeye salmon harvests declined relatively little because returns to Bristol Bay in the southeastern Bering Sea remained robust and offset the exceptionally low harvests of sockeye salmon in the Gulf of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and the Columbia River. The decline in sockeye harvests in regions beyond Bristol Bay and the Alaska Peninsula, which intercepts many Bristol Bay sockeye salmon, was 44%. Pink salmon returning to the Norton Sound region in northern Alaska in 2020 continued with relatively high returns that began in 2016, providing evidence for the beneficial effects of the warming ocean on some salmon species in the extreme north.

We hypothesized that a tipping point was reached in the North Pacific Ocean, leading to the substantial decline of all five species of Pacific salmon in 2020. We suggested that the tipping point was caused by the combined effects of unusually frequent marine heatwaves since and exceptionally abundant pink salmon during 2018 and 2019. This hypothesis is partially supported by recent research on the combined effects of sea surface temperature (SST) and pink salmon abundance on productivity (return per spawner) of 47 sockeye salmon populations (brood years 1976–2009) ranging from the Fraser River in British Columbia to Bristol Bay, Alaska.

This research found that a 1.5°C increase in SST was associated with a 23% increase in sockeye productivity in the Bering Sea, a 9% productivity increase in the Gulf of Alaska, but with a 12% decline in productivity in the southern region (British Columbia and Southeast Alaska). Frequent heatwaves likely contributed to the growing abundance of pink salmon in the north while also contributing to a northward shift in the adverse effects of high SST on production of other salmon species.

The research also found that a 119 million increase in pink salmon abundance was historically associated with a 9% decline in sockeye productivity in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, and a 21% decline in British Columbia. This finding is consistent with a trophic cascade caused by abundant pink salmon and other studies indicating adverse effects of pink salmon on the growth, age-at-maturation, survival, and abundance of sockeye salmon, Chinook salmon, coho salmon, chum salmon, marine fishes, seabirds, and potentially southern resident killer whales. Additional evidence of adverse interactions between pink salmon and other species is shown by the biennial patterns in marine species that are consistent with the biennial pattern in pink salmon; a pattern that cannot be explained by physical oceanography alone.

The adverse effect of numerous pink salmon on vital rates of other salmon species has the potential to be far-reaching because salmon migrate long distances. For example, 11–38% of Chinook salmon sampled on the southeastern Bering Sea shelf during 2005–2010 originated from the west coast of the contiguous United States. Furthermore, commercial catch of Chinook salmon in Alaska, Russia, and British Columbia (which includes many southward migrating Chinook salmon), and the average weight of Chinook salmon in Alaska are negatively correlated with pink salmon abundance during the three years in which Chinook salmon overlap with pink salmon at sea. The diets of Chinook and pink salmon can significantly overlap, especially when pink salmon are in their second year at sea, as both species consume small fishes, squid, and zooplankton.

The tipping point hypothesis stems from the record-setting back-to-back-year abundances of pink salmon and unique ocean conditions leading up to the salmon decline in 2020. Both pink salmon abundance and SST were relatively high leading up to the salmon decline in 2020.

Furthermore, pink salmon abundance in 2018 did not decline as in past even-numbered years. This hypothesis is consistent with research that has uncovered non-stationary effects of ocean temperatures on salmon catch in the Gulf of Alaska, including negative effects of recent heatwaves on catch and the interactive effect of climate and competition among wild and hatchery pink salmon.

Preliminary 2021 commercial harvest data indicate a tremendous surge in pink salmon from the low numbers observed in 2020, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Commercial harvests of pink salmon in Alaska and Russia rebounded and led to the largest harvest of pink salmon on record since 1925 (~515 million pink salmon, all regions combined).

Sockeye salmon abundance in Bristol Bay, Alaska, set a record high in 2021 — 66 million fish (catch and escapement). apparently in response to favorable early marine growth in the Bering Sea, relatively few pink salmon returning from the North Pacific in 2020, and few pink salmon in the Bristol Bay region. Pink salmon and Bristol Bay sockeye salmon are the primary reason for the resurgence of total salmon in 2021.

In contrast, overall commercial harvests of Chinook, chum, and coho salmon, as well as non-Bristol Bay sockeye salmon, remained low throughout Asia and North America during 2021. Relative to harvests during 2010 to 2019, chum salmon harvests declined the most (-38%), followed by Chinook (-33%), coho (-25%) and sockeye salmon beyond the Bristol Bay and the Alaska Peninsula management area (-27%).

In British Columbia, harvests of all five species appear to have been very low in 2021, with preliminary estimates of total commercial harvest being less than 10% of the average harvest during 2010–2019.

The jury is still out on the validity of our tipping point hypothesis in which the combined effects of high back-to-back pink salmon abundance (2018 and 2019) and frequent marine heatwaves led to large reductions in the abundance of all species in 2020.

The record high harvest of pink salmon in 2021 represented approximately 81% of all salmon harvests, and approximately 87% of all harvests if the large harvest of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon are excluded. In contrast, harvests of other salmon species in most regions of the North Pacific remained very low relative to 2010 to 2019.

Given the sudden and widespread decline in salmon abundance in 2020, we suspect that factors during late marine life were important to the widespread decline in addition to factors during early marine life and freshwater residence. The exceptional abundance of pink salmon in 2021 raises the concern for rapid recovery of salmon in many regions, but it is difficult to predict whether high pink salmon abundance will exacerbate poor feeding conditions for other salmon species in the near future or partially offset the benefit of favorable ocean conditions if conditions improve.

Regardless, with such high abundances of pink salmon returning from the North Pacific as it warms and their effect on the growth and survival of other salmon species, we ask: are there too many salmon in the ocean and if so, should hatcheries continue to release up to 5.5 billion salmon each year of which nearly 1.5 billion are pink salmon?

For the full report with graphs and research citations see the NPAFC newsletter.

Ruggerone, G.T., J.R. Irvine, and B. Connors. 2021. Did recent marine heatwaves and record high pink salmon abundance lead to a tipping point that caused record declines in North Pacific salmon abundance and harvest in 2020?

Also see:

— CBB, June 30, 2021, RESEARCH: TIPPING POINT REACHED IN NORTH PACIFIC, LEADING TO SUBSTANTIAL DECLINE IN ALL FIVE PACIFIC SALMON SPECIES IN 2020 https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/research-tipping-point-reached-in-north-pacific-leading-to-substantial-decline-in-all-five-pacific-salmon-species-in-2020/

— CBB, April 13, 2018, CARRYING CAPACITY: HIGH NUMBERS OF PINK, CHUM SALMON IN NORTH PACIFIC MAY BE HURTING CHINOOK https://www.www.www.staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/carrying-capacity-high-numbers-of-pink-chum-salmon-in-north-pacific-may-be-hurting-chinook/

— CBB, April 3, 2015, HOW MANY SALMON CAN NORTH PACIFIC SUPPORT? STUDY LOOKS AT COMPETITION BETWEEN SOCKEYE, PINKS https://www.www.www.staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/how-many-salmon-can-north-pacific-support-study-looks-at-competition-between-sockeye-pinks/

— CBB, Oct. 8, 2010, HUGE HATCHERY RELEASES FROM JAPAN, ALASKA FILL NORTH PACIFIC WITH PINK, CHUM, SOCKEYE; TOO MUCH? https://www.www.www.staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/huge-hatchery-releases-from-japan-alaska-fill-north-pacific-with-pink-chum-sockeye-too-much/

Photo: Marsh Creek, in the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, is one of the three highest salmon spawning areas in the world. All three are in central Idaho. (Courtesy of Kim Cross)

By Pat Ford

On a map, the heart of Idaho is the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and its nearly two million-acre watershed. This is a big, wild heart.   

The world comes to Idaho to run the Middle Fork, and taste for a week the wildness the river gathers. Idahoans can taste it any time we want. Whether from Paris or Pocatello, people who come to the Middle Fork leave exhilarated, and often redeemed.

Mountain Shoshoni and Nez Perce people have used the Middle Fork, and passed it on, for some 10,000 years. Today nearly all of it is public land, each one of us a co-owner. And almost all of it has permanent protection in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Thus secured, the Middle Fork is a cultural and economic engine, especially for central Idaho. It is also a place of pilgrimage.

Winter is its essential season. The watershed is a sponge, filled each year with snowmelt that is meted out through the year as glorious life. Salmon are its essential creatures. They have named its river and lands. They bring their ocean bodies up to 850 miles inland and 7,000 feet high to reproduce – and then, in death, feed plants, trees, insects, trout, ouzels, eagles, bears, otters and more. 

Yet salmon are nearly gone from their river today. Biologists report that, in 2021, the Middle Fork watershed’s 500-plus miles of superb spawning habitat held just 362 salmon redds. (Redds are the nests female salmon scoop into streambed gravels, then fill with eggs.) Since 2017, for five years running, the best salmon habitat in the Northwest has hosted less than one redd per mile of stream. That is a flashing red light, whose message is extinction, soon.        

Three Idaho scientists have estimated that the Middle Fork watershed hosted over 20,000 redds into the 1960s. Over 40,000 salmon! Such capacity still exists.  The Middle Fork is the largest, highest, coldest, wildest, best-connected and best-protected salmon stronghold in the 48 states. The place being special, so are its Chinook salmon. Their wide native diversity, free of hatchery influence, equips them to persist.

There’s no mystery why this stronghold now holds so few salmon. Downstream of Idaho, eight federal dams and 320 miles of reservoir have, since 1975, massively degraded the migratory habitat through which salmon reach and return from the North Pacific Ocean. Mortality also now comes from heat, steadily rising in the ponded reservoirs. Summer water temperatures are routinely at or above 70 degrees for two months, killing and depleting cold-water salmon.

Kyle Dittmer, who studied climate change for Columbia Basin tribes, called the Middle Fork and the lands around it a “Noah’s Ark for Salmon,” our best chance to sustain salmon in an uncertain future. Five main reasons: its high cold spawning habitat, vast extent, high percentage of public and ceded lands, wide diversity within its salmon populations, and the comparatively hotter spawning conditions facing lower-elevation salmon. But the Ark in central Idaho meets an anti-Ark downstream. Salmon can survive a few dams; they did so into the 1960s, with four dams. But not eight, and not with the heat those added four dams now concentrate.

One Idaho political leader has responded. Congressman Mike Simpson has developed a balanced plan to remove four of the eight dams downstream, while extending life for the other four; replace and exceed the energy and agricultural benefits from the four dams that go; and expand state and tribal authority over federal salmon spending. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and 57 Northwest tribes support his initiative. It will bring salmon, and steelhead trout, back into the Middle Fork and central Idaho.

So far, Idaho’s other elected leaders are sitting it out. Dismembering Creation in the evermore Salmonless River seems fine with them. The Shoshone-Bannock and Nez Perce Tribes see more deeply. The tribes’ skilled, prayerful advocacy for their own salmon people and traditions is defending all Idahoans, now and to come, against extinction of salmon in our state. Take a quiet moment, if you’re inclined, to send your thanks their way.

Spurred by tribal and non-tribal people in Washington, and by salmon-starved orca whales along their coast, Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington are examining, in depth, if and how to restore the lower Snake River by removing its four dams. They promise a yes or no decision by July. If yes, the fulcrum of Northwest politics will shift, and Idaho salmon, including in the Middle Fork, will have what is likely a last chance.  

I hope Murray and Inslee come see the Middle Fork this spring. If they come, they will remember. They will also better know what Idaho mountain salmon can do for people, justice, orcas, and resilience in Washington, if the lower Snake River is freed.  

I believe I’ve been somewhere in the Middle Fork every year since 1986. For too many of those years, I let work keep my trips to one or two. Bob Dylan said it pretty well: ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. 

Pat Ford grew up in Idaho Falls. He worked for the Idaho Conservation League for seven years, and he worked for the Save Our wild Salmon Coalition for 22 years. He retired in 2014 and lives in Boise.

This column first appeared in the Idaho Capital Sun.

Also see:

— CBB, Oct. 22, 2021, WASHINGTON GOVERNOR, SENATOR ANNOUNCE JOINT STATE-FEDERAL EFFORT TO ASSESS BREACHING LOWER SNAKE DAMS; REPORT DUE NEXT SUMMER https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/washington-governor-senator-announce-joint-state-federal-effort-to-assess-breaching-lower-snake-dams-report-due-next-summer/

— CBB, Feb. 5, 2021, IDAHO U.S. REP. SIMPSON PROPOSING SWEEPING $32 BILLION ‘COLUMBIA BASIN FUND’ TO FINANCE LOWER SNAKE RIVER DAM BREACHING https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/idaho-u-s-rep-simpson-proposing-sweeping-32-billion-columbia-basin-fund-to-finance-lower-snake-river-dam-breaching/

The U.S. Department of Energy announced $25 million in funding to support increased research, development, and demonstration of technologies that harness wave power to create electricity. The funding supports eight projects that will make up the first round of open-water testing at the PacWave South test site off the Oregon coast.

In March, 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Oregon State University a license to build and operate the nation’s first pre-permitted wave energy testing facility, culminating an unprecedented regulatory process that spanned nearly 10 years.

PacWave South is the first commercial-scale, utility grid-connected test site in the United States to obtain a FERC license and will be the first marine renewable energy research facility in federal waters off the Pacific Coast.

The test site, located about seven miles offshore southwest of Newport, Oregon, will offer wave energy developers the opportunity to try different technologies for harnessing the power of ocean waves and transmitting that energy to the local electrical grid.

The DOE funding awards are aimed at strengthening  wave energy technologies to “accelerate their commercial viability and deploy them at scale to help decarbonize the grid and reach President Biden’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” said DOE. 

“Harnessing the unrelenting power of the ocean is a clean, innovative, and sustainable way to curtail carbon pollution — benefitting American businesses and families, especially coastal communities hit hardest by the impacts of climate change,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Diversifying and expanding our clean energy sources will usher in a new era of energy independence that makes the grid more resilient, curbs the climate crisis, and saves Americans money on their energy bills.”

Waves are created when wind blows over the surface of open water in the ocean, and this movement results in a substantial amount of natural energy. Wave energy converters, which capture and convert waves into carbon-free electricity, require testing in realistic conditions to be deployed at scale. Obstacles to testing in the open ocean include permitting challenges and a scarcity of available test sites.

In 2016, DOE partnered with Oregon State University to build the PacWave South test facility, which will be the nation’s first accredited, grid-connected, pre-permitted, open-water wave energy test facility. 

The selected projects are part of DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office “Advancing Wave Energy Technologies through Open Water Testing at PacWave” funding opportunity to support wave energy technologies through research, development, and eventual deployment.

The eight projects focus on:

Testing wave energy converter designs for use in geographically remote areas or on small, local energy grids.

–CalWave Power Technologies Inc. (Oakland, CA) (Award amount: $7,500,000)

–Columbia Power Technologies Inc. (Charlottesville, VA) (Award amount: $4,182,275)

Developing wave energy converter designs that can be either connected to or disconnected from the electricity grid.

–Dehlsen Associates, LLC (Santa Barbara, CA) (Award amount: $1,800,000)

–Oscilla Power Inc. (Seattle, WA) (Award amount: $1,800,000)

Performing research and development at PacWave related to environmental monitoring technologies, instrumentation systems that operators use to control wave energy converters, and other technologies.

–Integral Consulting (Seattle, WA) (Award amount: $379,329)

–Littoral Power Systems, Inc. (New Bedford, MA) (Award amount: $3,976,401)

–Portland State University (Portland, OR) (Award amount: $4,507,330)

— University of Washington (Seattle, WA) (Award amount: $1,299,689)

“Wave energy is an essential piece of the strategy to combat the climate crisis, and

I’m gratified that Oregon State University, Portland State University and our state will play a central role in developing this energy source to its full potential,” said U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). “I look forward very much to what the innovative minds at both OSU and PSU as well as elsewhere develop with these projects that put our country on the path to a clean energy future.”

Also see:

— CBB, March 11, 2021, FERC ISSUES OSU LICENSE FOR NATION’S FIRST WAVE ENERGY TESTING FACILITY https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/ferc-issues-osu-license-for-nations-first-wave-energy-testing-facility/

— CBB, Feb. 26, 2021, FEDS AWARD OSU LEASE FOR NATION’S FIRST WAVE ENERGY TESTING FACILITY: $80 MILLION PROJECT OFF NEWPORT https://staging.columbiabasinbulletin.org/feds-award-osu-lease-for-nations-first-wave-energy-testing-facility-80-million-project-off-newport/