[3] New Cracks Show In Collaborative BiOp Effort
Federal agencies released a glowing mid-June report on their progress toward recovering salmon populations in the Columbia River. It included an upbeat rendition of the collaborative effort now underway between tribes, states and feds to develop a new hydro BiOp under the orders of U.S. District Court judge James Redden.
But the report fails to note the growing dissension in some of the workgroups dealing with the 10-step process looking at different factors that limit improvement of the ESA-listed stocks, and what can be done about it.
Some state, tribal and federal participants are still raising questions about flows and fish survival that NMFS scientists answered nearly three years ago in the process of writing the 2004 BiOp, which Redden threw out last year.
Though participants in the work groups are supposed to keep their discussions among themselves, some complaints have surfaced. Two memos recently posted on the Fish Passage Center's Web site showed how unhappy some state, tribal and technical folks are with the current state of affairs.
The memos air concerns about the new passage model being developed to estimate fish survival, both through the hydro system and in the ocean. The model will eventually be used to weigh the benefits of different hydro operations to reduce expected "gaps" in survival between current operations and what is needed in the future.
The memos argue that the feds are setting up the new model to be "insensitive" to management options like breaching or drawdown scenarios, because the feds wanted to measure survival per distance. The critics said flow and distance factors wouldn't change if breaching options were modeled, but water travel time would because reservoir cross-sections would be a lot smaller, which is what the feds want the model to focus on.
The memos, signed by representatives of Oregon and Idaho state fish agencies, along with the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and USFWS, "strongly" disagree with NOAA Fisheries on other basic issues, including the elimination of some dubious survival data that had high error bounds.
The fish managers said dumping the low-quality data reduced the contrasts in flow and spill effects compared to another method that used the full data set but gave the uncertain data less weight in the analysis.
"The likely result is that COMPASS will be insensitive to changes in flow and spill which have been shown to be important factors affecting survival," said the memo to NOAA scientist Rich Zabel, who is leading the modeling effort for federal agencies.
The complaints seem to have paid off. Later, the same memo says they were pleased to find out that the feds had told a panel of independent scientists that they had decided to use the inverse-variance method in their current round of modeling.
But the state and tribal fish folks were still griping because the feds were looking at juvenile fish survival using per-unit-travel-time as the dependent variable. The critics said the variable in the model should simply be survival because it is highly correlated with water particle travel time [WPTT], more so than with fish travel time and distance traveled.
The joint memo argued that the data shows that Snake River fish survival decreased after the dams were built, but the distance did not change. They said water travel time should be used as an independent variable because it accounted for both flow and reservoir volume, "and because water travel time is a reasonable surrogate for fish travel time, there is a biological connection with survival that does not exist with distance."
But federal scientists have heard this argument before. In the previous collaboration after Judge Redden tossed the 2000 BiOp, NOAA fisheries developed several technical memos dealing with dam operations and effects on fish. In a lengthy memo on dam effects, federal scientists discussed many of their points of disagreement with state and tribal managers after it became clear the collaboration would not create a scientifically based framework for analysis that was accepted by all parties.
NOAA Fisheries looked at the WPTT issue in its February 2005 technical memo on the effects of dams on listed fish. They found that except for the extremely low flow year 2001, fish travel time through the hydro system in recent times has varied by only a few days. But before the lower Snake dams were constructed, the fish took 40 percent to 50 percent less time to migrate downriver through the system.
Looking at each year, they said median travel time for groups of PIT-tagged yearling Chinook salmon generally decreased as the migration season progressed, "as flows have generally increased and as WTT has decreased."
But they noted that water velocity "is clearly not the only driver of travel time in all years: in 1998, and especially in 2002 and 2003, the early part of the migration season featured relatively long periods of nearly constant flow. In these years, nonetheless, median travel times for yearling Chinook salmon decreased throughout the period, even without change in flow. This result suggests that physiological characteristics of juvenile fish (possibly the degree of smoltification) or physiological responses to day length or moon phase might have influenced migration rates more than flow."
When all was said and done, after translating flow into a water particle time index gave them a similar relationship with fish survival as did flow, one they termed "weak and inconsistent."
When water temperatures reach 13 degrees C, fish survival for spring chinook drops regardless of flows, and survival data from 2001 fits temperatures much better than any other variable, the feds said.
But one of the states' and tribes' May memos even included a January 2006 document from Earl Weber of the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission that suggested the water temperature variable be thrown out of the new model.
The critics also said the new model would probably underestimate the value of removable spillway weirs at dams because it would not detect the reduction in forebay delay that fish likely benefit from.
The fish managers were dubious that the model could even perform as advertised, being able the separate dam mortality from reservoir mortality. They also suggested (again) that some weight-of-evidence process be put in place to permit assessments of alternate survival hypotheses or models of inriver passage survival. "Without such a framework that allows for differences in opinion when the data are questionable," they wrote, "the resulting projections will not account for the true range of potential outcomes."
The pugnacious fish managers even took issue with a recent review of the new COMPASS model by the group of independent scientists [Independent Scientific Advisory Board] who weigh in on regional salmon issues for the NWPPC and NOAA Fisheries, and said the COMPASS model overstated the association between low flows and poor survivals. The managers claimed that other low flow years besides 2001 showed very poor survivals, notably 1973 and 1977.
It's unlikely that the fish-agency folks who wrote the memos will be placated by any final pronouncements from the ISAB. Cynics in the process say that the fish folks are just working on a paper trail that could be used in more litigation over the BiOp process. -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
Agencies and Tribes Joint Technical Memorandums
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