[2] Upper Columbia Recovery Plan Finally Finished
The federal government has finally completed its recovery plan for upper Columbia spring chinook, steelhead, and bull trout, with just as much uncertainty and twice the price tag of a draft proposal released last year. Last year's admittedly lowball cost-estimate of $154 million (including hatchery costs) for the next 10 years has been increased to $296 million (excluding hatchery costs) for all recovery-related spending by all agencies, including tribes, local, state and federal governments.
The document says the stocks could be recovered in the next 10- to 30-year period if all the recommendations are followed. A minimum recovery goal for spring chinook is 4,500 naturally produced spawners, with more specific goals for the Wenatchee, Entiat and Methow populations.
About 1,600 natural-origin spring chinook spawners were estimated to have returned to the Upper Columbia in 2002, considerably better than the less than 300 fish returning in 1999 when the ESU hit the endangered species list. In 1995, the return was under a hundred fish.
Along with other criteria for recovery, listed steelhead will have a minimum goal of 3,000 spawners among four local populations. In 2002, it was estimated that about 3,000 natural-origin steelhead returned to the Upper Columbia. In 1996, the year before they were listed, about 600 returned.
However, the plan is totally voluntary, and it readily acknowledges that it will take more than simply improving upper-C habitat to restore the stocks, but that it will take big improvements in other H's as well.
And big questions remain about how to pay for it. With more than 400 actions in the plan, NMFS said (in a response to written comments) that "funding for many of the projects is a concern." Noting that funding may often have to be secured on an annual basis, they said some important items may not get any money. With the mid-Columbia PUDs already ponying up millions to pay for habitat conservation plans, NMFS still expects the utilities, along with state and federal agencies to pay for projects ranked high by watershed action teams and the regional technical team.
In the draft plan released last year, the planners examined potential costs and benefits. Using the EDT [Ecosystem Diagnosis and Treatment] analysis tool developed by regional consultant Lars Mobrand, they found that fish benefits tapered off considerably after the first third of the plan was implemented. With the habitat plan implemented at one-third "intensity," it was estimated that spring chinook numbers could increase 3 percent to 25 percent. At 100-percent intensity, the estimate was a 3- to 36-percent benefit in fish numbers.
Without any empirical data to back them up, the planners suggested that hatchery improvements could achieve a 3- to 5-percent increase in naturally produced spring chinook and steelhead in the Wenatchee-Entiat stocks, and a 5- to 10-percent improvement for salmonids in the Methow and Okanogan.
Using another tool developed by the EDT folks called the "All-H Analyzer," they said preliminary results suggested that hatcheries may play a big role in the fitness of naturally produced chinook and steelhead. They said wild spawners would probably benefit by reducing the numbers of hatchery fish on spawning grounds "through removal at collection points or selective harvest."
The draft plan also estimated a 10-percent boost in productivity of spring chinook if all harvest (mostly in the lower Columbia) stopped, but they said wild steelhead numbers might actually decrease, since a reduced harvest could swamp spawning grounds with hatchery steelhead.
And it estimated up to a 50-percent improvement in productivity for juvenile chinook and 40 percent for steelhead after improvements are made at PUD projects and federal mainstem dams.
The final plan rejected advice from a technical recovery team that called for meeting abundance/productivity criteria for chinook and steelhead populations that estimated extinction risk at only 1 percent over the next 100 years. Instead, recovery planners decided that a 5-percent extinction risk for most populations was good enough for government work.
In its Oct. 9 Federal Register notice, NMFS said it didn't think it is possible "at this time" to know how much more effort it would take to go from the 95 percent to the 99 percent level of persistence. But the agency said it would take another look at the stocks' status within five years to see if the recovery criteria are still appropriate, or if modifications are necessary.
The feds stressed the bottoms-up approach of the plan. "The contributions at the local level have been particularly gratifying," said regional NOAA Fisheries administrator Bob Lohn. "Local governments, watershed councils, land owners, environmental groups and others were all enormously helpful in creating this plan with their thoughtful and constructive comments throughout the process."
The plan was turned over to the feds in 2005 after a long struggle by local entities to complete it under the aegis of the Upper Columbia Salmon Recovery Board. The board, made up of representatives from Chelan, Douglas and Okanogan County, and the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Colville Tribes, coordinated the effort, soliciting input from watershed and farm groups, and other interested parties.
Most of the salmon decline was blamed on habitat destruction, dam operations and adverse hatchery impacts. However, from information collected by the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1940s, it was learned that many tributary runs had been wiped out long before Grand Coulee Dam was built on the mainstem Columbia.
One of the more controversial elements in the plan relies on some hatcheries to play an "essential role" in recovering the stocks, while working to keep many hatchery fish away from spawning grounds.
For years, NMFS has been trying to implement a policy that keeps less than five percent strays in a native population. But just what kind of native gene pool still exists in the mid-Columbia is not well-documented. Most upper Columbia chinook runs were trashed long before mainstem dams were built, according to a 1987 USFWS study by federal biologist James Mullan.
Mullan, who worked for years out of an office at the Leavenworth Hatchery, acknowledged the uncertainty of the situation. "Was the trapping of returning adult chinook at Rock Island Dam for release in other streams a salvage operation which in the long run salvaged nothing (Ricker, 1972)? In the short term, the salvage operation expedited restoration of runs in tributaries below Grand Coulee Dam. In the long term, the genetic diversity that characterized runs was presumably maintained to some unknown extent," his study said.
But in another study completed a few years later, Mullan said a later phase of hatchery propagation in the region, which began in 1969, used mostly the Carson stock, along with eggs from the Cowlitz River and the Little White Salmon and Spring Creek hatcheries in the lower Columbia, to maintain a continuing egg supply. Mullan reported that there was so much mixing at mid-Columbia hatcheries, "the original gene pool may have been significantly altered." -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
Upper Columbia Sub-Domain ESA Salmon Recovery Plan
NW Fishletter #221, October 12, 2006
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