The National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service this week announced the initiation of a new Environmental Impact Statement process to evaluate options for restoring and managing grizzly bears in the North Cascades of Washington, where the animals once thrived.
As climate change worsens water quality and threatens ecosystems, the famous dams of beavers may help lessen the damage.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded Oregon State University and its research partners $4.2 million to investigate how multiple climate change-related stressors are impacting marine ecosystems off the coast of Oregon, Washington and Northern California.
The 2023 white sturgeon fishing season gets underway Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023 on select sections of the Columbia River upstream of Bonneville Dam, fishery managers from Oregon and Washington announced Wednesday.
The Bureau of Reclamation began releasing extra water at Grand Coulee Dam over the weekend to ensure that protective flows for spawning chum salmon could begin Tuesday, Nov. 1 at Bonneville Dam, regardless of whether chum were present.
California state scientists have released a new report that shows how the impacts of climate change are rapidly accelerating in California. Key findings illustrate an exponential increase in wildfires and point to a hotter, drier environment driven by megadrought. Climate-influenced changes in freshwater and ocean conditions, says the report, are threatening the survival of Chinook salmon in Northern California rivers.
There is an increase in the number of stranded California sea lions along the entire Oregon coast due to leptospirosis, a naturally-occurring bacteria that can also sicken dogs, people, other wildlife, and livestock.
Just as you might look down at the sidewalk as you walk, fish look downward when they swim, a new study by a Northwestern University-led international collaboration has confirmed.
A UCLA-led study published this week reveals that migratory birds across North America are getting smaller, a change the researchers attribute to the rapidly warming climate.
As marine species continue to decline worldwide, the southern resident killer whale population — which now stands at 75 individuals — along the west coast of North America, has baffled scientists who are trying to understand why this population is struggling.
Conservationists filed a formal notice this week of their intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for once again denying Montana’s Arctic grayling population Endangered Species Act protections. Arctic grayling is a freshwater fish in the same family (Salmonidae) as salmon, trout, and whitefish.
Faster and more widespread testing for chronic wasting disease in deer is now possible due to a new partnership between the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Oregon State University’s Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
New research from the University of Oxford, Yellowstone National Park, and Penn State, published this week in the journal Science, may have finally solved why wolves change color across the North American continent.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has finalized protections for the emperor penguin, a flightless seabird endemic to Antarctica, under the Endangered Species Act. The emperor penguin is listed as a threatened species and includes a section 4(d) rule that tailors protections for the species. The impact of climate change on sea-ice habitat, where the species spends the majority of its life, is the primary threat to the penguin.
Narwhals are changing their migration patterns in response to pressure from changing Arctic climates, a new University of British Columbia report has found.
An international coalition of researchers says in a report published this week that the Earth’s vital signs have worsened to the point that “humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency.”
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Audubon Society of Portland filed a formal notice this week of their intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to better protect the streaked horned lark, a rare bird found in Washington and Oregon.
Washington U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray announced $36 million in grant funds to state, local, Tribal and federal partners to support the continued conservation and restoration of Puget Sound.
In response to a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed this week to a deadline of December 2024 to determine whether Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebees warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Four populations of lower Columbia River salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act are in as much trouble today as they were in 2016. In its five-year status review for these fish released this morning, NOAA Fisheries says “the collective risk” has not changed significantly and the “overall level of concern remains the same.”
The Burns Paiute Tribe, a federally-recognized Indian tribe, signed an agreement this month with the state of Oregon and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to collaborate on reintroducing salmon and steelhead to the Malheur River, a tributary of the Snake River. Construction of the Hells Canyon dams in 1958 blocked all anadromous fish from the Upper Snake River basin and Malheur River system.
Struggling salmon populations could get some help from the sky. A Washington State University study showed that drone photography of the Wenatchee River during spawning season can be effective in estimating the number of rocky hollows salmon create to lay their eggs, also called “redds.”
Gray whales that migrate along the West Coast of North America continued to decline in number over the last two years, according to a new NOAA Fisheries assessment. The population is now down 38 percent from its peak in 2015 and 2016, as researchers probe the underlying reasons.
This year La Niña returns for the third consecutive winter, and starting in December 2022 through February 2023, NOAA predicts drier-than-average conditions across the South with wetter-than-average conditions for areas of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, according to NOAA’s U.S. Winter Outlook released today by the Climate Prediction Center — a division of the National Weather Service.
Between February and April 2022, five international research vessels participated in the largest ever pan-Pacific research expedition to study the winter ecology of salmon in the North Pacific Ocean.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
