The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service have released a draft plan analyzing options to restore grizzly bears to the North Cascades in Washington.
A deep reservoir drawdown at Green Peter Dam in the Willamette Valley to improve passage for Chinook salmon and steelhead has killed thousands of kokanee salmon.
A new report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory shows that along a 200-mile stretch of ocean off the coast of southern Oregon and northern California, floating wind farms could potentially triple the Pacific Northwest’s wind power capacity while offsetting potentially billions of dollars in costs for utilities, ratepayers, insurance companies, and others across the West who bear the cost of climate change’s effects.
In a one-year agreement announced between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Oregon will be a source for up to 10 wolves for the Colorado gray wolf reintroduction effort. These wolves will be captured and translocated between December 2023 and March 2024.
With an updated and higher fall Chinook run forecast, recreational angling for salmon will continue through the end of the year on the mainstem Columbia River from Buoy 10 to the Oregon/Washington border near Pasco, WA.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice this week of its intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect four imperiled bee species, including American bumblebees, under the Endangered Species Act. Southern Plains bumblebees, variable cuckoo bumblebees and blue calamintha bees are also included in today’s filing.
On Oct. 3, the Bonneville Power Administration made its annual payment to the U.S. Department of the Treasury for the 40th consecutive year on time and in full, bringing cumulative payments to approximately $34.6 billion over this period. The total payment for fiscal year 2023 was $1.02 billion.
With the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference just a few weeks away, countries will soon take stock of their progress in the worldwide effort to slow and adapt to global warming. Better known as COP28, the conference offers the chance for countries to meet and coordinate their climate-mitigating pledges, like achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 or peak emissions by 2030.
Pacific lamprey are returning to the Columbia and Snake rivers this year in record numbers, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Nez Perce Tribe.
In a presidential memorandum released Wednesday, the Biden Administration emphasized salmon and steelhead restoration in the Columbia and Snake river basins and called for an all-hands-on-deck approach to recovery of the fish.
Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon are in steep decline in the North Pacific and one of the causes is the proliferation of pink salmon, many of which originate from Russian, Japanese and Alaskan fish hatcheries, according to a recent study by scientists in Alaska, Canada and Washington.
The Yurok Tribe and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), in collaboration with the Shasta Indian Nation, started preparing a stretch of the Klamath River to flow freely for the first time in a century.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has recently released two reports — one a report on fish and wildlife expenses incurred by the Bonneville Power Administration in the Columbia/Snake river basins and, more recently, a second report that will be sent to Congress that is currently out for public review until Dec. 12. Both reports are for fiscal year 2022.
The Western United States is losing its glaciers. A new inventory from Portland State University researchers shows that some glaciers have disappeared entirely, some no longer show movement, some are too small to meet the 0.01 square kilometer minimum and some are actually rock glaciers — rocky debris with ice in the pore spaces.
The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded a coalition of academic and oceanographic research organizations including Oregon State University a five-year, $220 million cooperative agreement to continue operating and maintaining the Ocean Observatories Initiative.
Ecologists have demonstrated that the genetic material that species shed into their environments can reveal not only the presence of the species but also a broad range of information about the genetics of whole populations — information that can help scientists trace the source of a new invasive population as well as prevent further invasion.
This is what we believe is wrong with the dam breaching concept. There were far more fish that returned in the first 15 years of the 21st century than ever did in the 20th century, fully 25 years after construction of the last dam on the lower Snake River. That is the case for both steelhead and spring and summer chinook.
The Biden administration this week announced that the Bonneville Power Administration will provide three Upper Columbia River Tribes $200 million over 20 years for ongoing efforts to reintroduce salmon above Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams, which have blocked fish migration since 1942. The Tribes have agreed to a twenty-year pause to existing litigation while these actions are pursued.
The Idaho State Department of Agriculture confirmed this week the presence of quagga mussel larvae in the Snake River at Twin Falls. Multiple samples of quagga mussel at larval life stages have been found in the Centennial Waterfront Park area by ISDA’s early detection monitoring program.
With a higher in-season forecast of Chinook salmon tracking above the 5- and 10-year average, Oregon and Washington reopened all the Columbia River downstream of Bonneville Dam to recreational angling for Chinook and hatchery coho as of Sept. 22. The reopening is for the remainder of this year.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold four virtual listening-only sessions this month and in October to describe how it will operate the Columbia River system of dams after September 2024 if the Columbia River Treaty negotiations fail to reach an agreement.
A long-running annual report that evaluates salmon and steelhead survival in the Columbia and Snake rivers again this year concluded that removal of the lower Snake River dams poses less of a risk to recovery than allowing the four dams to remain in place.
By legislative requirement, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Portland District is assessing whether it should continue to produce hydroelectric power at its Willamette Valley project dams.
With an upgraded fall chinook run, fishery managers from Oregon and Washington added more recreational salmon fishing opportunity on the Columbia River below Bonneville Dam during a joint Columbia River Compact hearing Wednesday. But the hearing took an unusual turn when Washington and Oregon diverged on how much more commercial gillnetting should be allowed, and where.
With climate change, some spawning habitat in British Columbia could actually expand, peaking in area around 2060, according to a recent study that looked at current stream habitat and projected future favorable spawning habitat as the climate warms.
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