[5] Mid-C Steelhead Recovery Plan Ripe For Public Comment
NOAA Fisheries has just released its newest fish recovery plan for public comment. The latest plan focuses on mid-Columbia steelhead populations that inhabit mainstem tributaries in Washington and Oregon and is expected to cost close to $235 million over the next five years, with a final price tag that approaches a billion dollars.
"By involving so many local groups, all of which have a passionate interest in seeing that these steelhead once again thrive, we have a proposed recovery plan that's scientifically sound and highly workable," said Bob Lohn, NOAA Fisheries regional administrator.
The plan is the product of a collaboration between the feds and the Mid-Columbia Recovery Forum, with help from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board, the Snake River Salmon Recovery Board, and numerous tribal, state, and federal stakeholders.
The Interior Columbia Technical Recovery Team pegged degraded tributary habitat, dam passage problems, adverse effects from hatchery influences, and the combined effects of competition, predation and disease, as the major factors in their decline.
The plan says current harvest levels are not a major threat to the recovery of the steelhead, but harvest should be monitored to verify impacts and reduce uncertainties. Prior to the 1970's, harvest rates on the Mid-C steelhead were about 65 percent, but much less since then.
Currently, non-treaty recreational fishers are limited by a 2-percent harvest rate. While tribal fishers have no set harvest rate. According to the plan, ODFW reported that non-reported tribal catch in 2004 was estimated at nearly 5 percent.
WDFW has estimated that the tribal harvest rate on the Mid-C summer run was 7.5 percent in 2002, with less than a 4-percent impact from non-tribal mainstem fisheries and only a .3 percent impact from recreational fishers in the tributaries.
To achieve recovery, survival gaps were developed by the technical recovery team, who modeled the needs based on three ocean regimes of varying productivity.
Under the most optimistic ocean regime, the Upper Yakima population would still need a 95-percent boost in abundance and productivity, while the most negative ocean regime would require a 120-percent boost. The Upper Yakima steelhead numbers have fluctuated between 34 and 283 in recent years, with a 10-year geometric mean of 84 fish. The TRT estimated that it would take a population of 1,500 to achieve what they call a "viability threshold," or less than a 5-percent chance of extinction in 100 years.
Some stocks are doing fine, like most in Oregon's John Day River, where numbers in the North Fork have ranged between 369 to more than 10,000, and the Umatilla, from around 600 to more than 3,500.
But fish in the westside Deschutes (10-yr. geomean 456) need at least a 60-percent improvement in abundance and productivity, according the TRT results. The eastside Deschutes population (10-yr. geomean 1,599), on the other hand, is classified as "viable."
The TRT classifies five stocks at "high risk" of extinction in 100 years and nine at "moderate" risk. The feds said it could take 50 to 100 years to restore them all. That's about the same time frame the feds figure it will take to recover most of the other ESA-listed populations in the Columbia Basin. -B. R.
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