[4] Science Panel Questions TRT's 'Gap' Analysis
A technical analysis quantifying the overall improvement in fish numbers needed to recover Interior Columbia Basin salmon populations is too confusing, "potentially" misleading, and even contains too many typos, an independent science panel said in a report released earlier this month.
Still, federal scientists like Mike Ford, Director of the Conservation Biology Program at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, said the panel's review of the Interior Columbia Technical Review Team's latest product was "basically positive."
The Independent Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) is frequently used by NOAA Fisheries and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to weigh in on controversial scientific issues related to salmon recovery.
Ford said his agency has used them to review other ICTRT products like its population viability criteria.
The ISAB's latest findings were included in a concise, 12-page report released March 7 and posted on the NPCC's Web site. The report answered several questions about the Interior Columbia Technical Recovery Team's analyses raised by federal scientist Usha Varanasi, who heads the NOAA Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.
The TRT, a mix of federal, state and tribal agency scientists, has spent the past few years sorting out salmon runs and developing an analysis of extinction risk for ESA-listed salmon and steelhead stocks in the interior Columbia Basin, which includes the Snake River runs. The TRT's gap analysis was the third step in a 10-step process outlined by NOAA Fisheries to get to the new hydro opinion.
The TRT has released several reports, including an interim "gap analysis" that estimated the survival improvements needed by different runs to ensure a low risk of extinction over the next 100 years. But in the most optimistic scenario developed by the team, it said Snake River spring chinook would still need an overall 29-percent boost in numbers to reduce extinction risk to less than five percent.
To reduce that risk below one percent, it said, the fish would need a 150-percent boost over their life-cycle.
In its final report, released last November, the TRT found median gap for the Snake spring/summer chinook around 33 percent under the most optimistic ocean conditions and improved survival from future BiOp actions. The gap needed to recover Upper Columbia spring chinook has shrunk from 53 percent in the interim report to 9 percent in the final.
For Upper Columbia steelhead, the interim gap was more than 300 percent, now it's down to 157 percent.
And for Snake River steelhead, the interim gap was a negative 23 percent, which meant no gap had to be filled. But the TRT's final analysis suggests that the stock is in worse shape and needs a 31-percent boost in survival in addition to what is gained from the new BiOp actions.
But the ISAB says the gap analysis "seems not to distinguish between gaps caused by unacceptable natural productivity and unacceptable abundance resulting from a shortage of suitable habitat. A pair of gap measurements would shed more light on both the nature and extent of factors limiting recovery."
They also pointed out that the gap analysis was based on only two of the four criteria for ESA recovery goals -- abundance and productivity -- since they can be more easily modeled than the other criteria of spatial structure and diversity.
One of the questions asked by NOAA Fisheries' Varanasi was whether the TRT results could be replicated.
The science panel's answer seems to be no, since it pointed out that there was "essentially no outside-the-group documentation (i.e., literature, peer-reviewed or not) for the methodologies and the rationale for using them. This may not be critical to the report, but if it is, then some more use of important literature is necessary. There is plenty of it out there for some of the topics."
But the review didn't take issue with the numbers themselves. However, others say they had only been able to reproduce the TRT's results after months of interaction with some TRT members and their spreadsheets.
And some regional scientists, in years past, have argued that such exercises are futile because of the huge data needs (see NW Fishletter 173).
The ISAB did say that the life-history matrix models for spring chinook and steelhead models developed by the TRT appeared to be sound. But the advisory board criticized the TRT's analysis for not including confidence bands in their gap analysis, which would have allowed readers to get a better idea of the uncertainty levels involved, rather than simply treating uncertainty "as a need for [a] higher restoration target."
The ISAB also felt the recovery team didn't use a future scenario of ocean conditions that was pessimistic enough, because "oceanic conditions are probably going to get worse for salmon than they have been in recent years, perhaps substantially worse."
However, the ISAB itself may get into an argument with NOAA Fisheries over just how much pessimism should be injected into those future scenarios.
Last October, in remarks that followed the release of the latest draft BiOp, regional NOAA administrator Bob Lohn said the most important assumption to make about predicting future fish numbers was how ocean conditions would affect them.
Lohn said the data set being used in the BiOp analysis had only four years favorable to salmon and 18 years of unfavorable conditions, so the feds' own analysis of the future was likely very conservative. If near-term ocean conditions are similar to what has occurred since the turn of the century, "the results obtained should be considerably better than those displayed in this opinion," he added.
But faced with such huge interim survival gaps developed by the TRT, the BiOp writers developed a 24-year risk of extinction metric more in sync with the 10-year planning life of the next hydro BiOp, while still paying lip service to the misty 100-year extinction-risk horizon so much in favor among conservation biologists.
The feds also built a "trending towards recovery" argument that said a stock's risk of extinction must be reduced if its numbers are growing, as most are these days. This has led to recent analyses that paint a rosier view of salmon futures, with less chance that weak stocks will wink out over the short-term.
The TRT analysis itself ran into technical problems in several areas. Results were highly variable, depending on such things as the time frame of past data, and the choice of a quasi-extinction threshold -- that is, whether the run had shrunk down to 50, 10, or simply one single fish.
In some cases, spring chinook runs in some Idaho streams had actually gone to zero in the mid-1990s, only to bounce back a few years later.
Plaintiffs in the BiOp litigation have called the feds for shelving the TRT results in favor of the 24-year analysis, arguing the point in status conferences with federal Judge James Redden, who is supervising the BiOp remand process.
Earthjustice attorney Todd True argued last December in Redden's courtroom that the federal jeopardy analysis was flawed because it didn't use results generated by the TRT.
But the feds said the TRT results were focused on recovery, while the BiOp analysis is focused on what fish wonks call the "survival" prong of the jeopardy standard, while the TRT's long-term gap analysis is geared toward the "recovery" prong of the jeopardy standard
At that hearing, federal attorney Robert Gulley said the feds had expanded their jeopardy analysis from the TRT results to include six additional ways of examining the trends of the stocks and what was needed to keep them on the road to recovery.
Gulley ran head-on into comments filed by the state of Oregon alleging the draft BiOp was not guided by science, but, rather, was manipulated by federal agencies to justify policy objectives that subordinated the needs of listed fish.
Gulley countered, claiming the state of Oregon failed to explain how the ISAB analyzed two issues -- the questions of latent mortality and the COMPASS model used to estimate survivals from different hydro operations -- and came up with results much different from the state's position.
Now that the ISAB has weighed in on the TRT recovery gaps, federal attorneys are sure to mention the board's review if plaintiffs litigate over the new BiOp that is expected May 5.
Lower Columbia tribes had also complained that the feds had disregarded the TRT results, but sources say the action agencies are close to reaching agreement over MOAs that would provide more salmon-recovery actions for tribes in return for their support of the upcoming salmon plan.
Redden said in December that he might use some kind of independent science panel to judge controversial salmon issues in the salmon plan -- and a list of names of ex-ISAB members has already been given to him. -B. R.
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