[4] BPA Calls For Changes In Fish Recovery Yardsticks
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council is getting in deep, thousands of pages deep, as the process to amend the region's fish and wildlife program picks up steam. By June 18, 65 sets of recommendations from fish agencies, tribes and citizens came in for review, followed by 147 comments on those recommendations.
Now, to help the process along, the Council staff has floated a list of "high-level" indicators designed to measure program success and is asking the public to comment on them.
The draft points to using biological indicators that include total numbers of salmon and steelhead, along with trends in abundance and productivity, for each ESU, with special attention on ESA-listed populations, life-cycle survival estimates, harvests and relative fitness of hatchery stocks funded by BPA.
The new initiative is supported by BPA and its customer groups as a way of changing the focus of the current F&W program's overarching goal to produce one to five million salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.
Actually, fish numbers nearly hit one million in 2000, and the following year topped 2.1 million salmon and steelhead counted at Bonneville Dam. In 2002 and 2003, fish numbers topped 1.5 million each year. That's a far cry from 1995, when fish totals hit about 461,000. And were in that range for some years thereafter.
But fish agencies want to keep the old goal intact and boost fish numbers passing Bonneville Dam to five million salmonids by 2024, according to comments submitted by the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority.
Another yardstick in the current program may be even harder to reach. It calls for restoring "the widest possible set of healthy naturally reproducing populations of salmon and steelhead in each relevant province by 2012. Healthy populations are defined as having an 80-percent probability of maintaining themselves for 200 years at a level that can support harvest rates of at least 30 percent."
In its latest comments, BPA trotted out an analysis by regional fisheries consultant Rich Hinrichsen that estimates survival goals for some specific populations in the Snake drainage may have to be four or five times higher than those estimated by the Interior Columbia Technical Recovery Team, which were based on a 5 percent extinction risk over the next 100 years.
That's why BPA is supporting a new yardstick using the abundance level and trend indicators instead of raw numbers, a position they say reflects the "the most accessible currency with which to evaluate the progress in region-wide recovery efforts over multiple years."
BPA also takes issue with the extensive CBFWA recommendations that estimate the level of improvement obtainable for fish populations in each subbasin--through use of the EDT [Ecosystem Diagnosis and Treatment] and AHA [All-H Analyzer] tools, which BPA says does not meet requirements of the Northwest Power Act's mandate to use the "best available science" for supporting all recommendations.
The power marketing agency pointed out that CBFWA lacks supporting documentation for 34 out of the 72 sections listed in its recommendations, while the state of Oregon submitted 86 recommendations with supporting documentation for only one.
Furthermore, BPA said it looks like CBFWA's use of the AHA tool to measure the amount of fish mitigation pinned to the hydro system is inappropriate--since AHA was developed to gauge wild and hatchery spawner performance under various hatchery scenarios under different harvest and habitat assumptions.
According to one regional biologist very familiar with the AHA tool, it was never intended to produce quantitative goals for any kind of gap analysis. He told NW Fishletter last fall that the inputs are very simple and not meant to be used to develop potential fish numbers.
BPA noted that a 2005 review of AHA by the Puget Sound technical recovery team judged that the model wasn't well documented and hadn't received enough review by scientific peers to give team members enough confidence to use the model to allocate effects between H's.
BPA said that the model has undergone further development since 2005, but still is largely undocumented. "This renders its use, whether for biological objectives or other purposes, highly questionable."
At this month's NPCC meeting, CBFWA executive director Brian Lipscomb said his group's analysis with the AHA tool was very comparable with the feds' analysis in the newest hydro BiOp. "They didn't use the same methodologies, but the results were comparable," said Lipscomb. "So, I think that what that tells you is that we're starting to get in the ballpark of what the hydropower effect is on anadromous fish."
BPA also questioned CBFWA's recommendation to keep the old program's 5-million-fish goal by 2025, given the region's independent science panels's own feelings on the subject, made known way back in 2001. In a review of the biological objectives of the 2000 F&W program, the Independent Scientific Advisory Board said at the time, "It is not possible to assess whether the numerical objectives for biological performance listed under "Anadromous fish losses" (p. 18) and the timeframes for achieving the objectives are realistic because no quantitative or qualitative justification of the objectives and timeframes is provided."
The state of Oregon's draconian hydro recommendations also came in for some heavy criticism from BPA, which said the state's "prescriptive" spill and flow regimes, specific operations and recommendations for new passage technologies conflict with the new BiOp and MOAs between some CBFWA members--NOAA Fisheries, the Umatilla, Colvilles, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes, and the states of Idaho and Washington.
The main rub with the CBFWA recommendations is that they seem to confuse the differences between the Council's program--which keeps fish recovery issues in a more general format, and its project solicitation process, which consists of on-the-ground efforts that have actually been through a scientific review process.
NOAA Fisheries signed aboard with the CBFWA recommendations, thinking that the AHA analysis was not going to be included in its final product. But the agency abstained from supporting the CBFWA recommendations for implementation.
The Council expects to release a draft of the latest F&W program by mid-August, with a series of public hearings planned through October before the amendments are finalized. -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
NW Council 2008-2009 Program Amendments
High-Level Indicators to Measure Success of the Fish and Wildlife Program
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