Wildlife conservation organizations sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday for missing a deadline to decide whether gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains warrant federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Hundreds of endangered northern leopard frogs will leap back into the wild at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge in Washington’s Grant County this month.
The states of Washington and Oregon, and a coalition of organizations, joined together to send a letter to President Joe Biden Tuesday calling for increased funding at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon this morning agreed to a request by the Biden Administration and plaintiffs to extend for another year the stay in the litigation challenging the federal government’s environmental impact statement and biological opinion for Columbia/Snake river salmon and steelhead. The parties want more time to identify “comprehensive” solutions to basin salmon recovery.
Spring Chinook salmon are still arriving at the Pelton-Round Butte Complex of dams on Central Oregon’s Deschutes River where they are trapped and hauled upstream to Lake Billy Chinook. And so far partners Portland General Electric and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs are seeing the best annual return of the fish since they began their efforts to reintroduce Chinook, sockeye and summer steelhead above the dams 13 years ago.
Anticipated future shifts in water supply and water demands will combine to create potential vulnerabilities related to water availability across many areas of eastern Washington, including trouble for fish, according to a new report from the Washington Department of Ecology, Washington State University, and the State of Washington Water Research Center.
Regional shifts in streamflows have prompted the Bonneville Power Administration to revise its generation forecast methodology to more accurately reflect a Northwest water supply impacted by climate change.
In the outer reaches of the Columbia River Basin, in central Idaho, a proposed open pit gold mining project has received its first significant permit from the state. And it is being challenged by the Nez Perce Tribe and others.
The first two sockeye salmon to arrive in the Sawtooth Basin near Stanley, Idaho, were trapped July 28 by Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists and some 2,066 of the Snake River run of sockeye have passed Lower Granite Dam, 30 miles downstream of Lewiston, ID.
Wolf numbers and distribution continue to be stable across Montana, according to numbers released this week in the 2021 Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Wolf Report.
The Owyhee River, a Columbia River basin tributary with headwaters in Nevada, where until 1928 salmon returned, is about to get attention from the Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District. The Corps, along with the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, is developing a plan to restore aquatic and riparian habitats on a section of the remote desert river.
A recent report on pinniped predation shows that the presence of California sea lions at Bonneville Dam has declined significantly since 2015 when 195 of the marine mammals were observed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the dam’s tailraces. The number in 2021 was just 24.
Though federal and state biologists have agreed to stop releasing hatchery winter and summer steelhead into the Hood River basin, a new study says that hatchery fish spawning in the river have little influence on wild winter steelhead productivity. Other variables, such as stream flow, abundance of sea lions in the Columbia River and ocean conditions have more influence than hatchery fish on the river’s spawning grounds.
The majority of the run of Snake River sockeye salmon, a small segment of the largest Columbia River sockeye run since Bonneville Dam was built in 1938 (most return to the upper Columbia), have passed eight Columbia and Snake river dams and are now moving up the Salmon River.
Columbia Riverkeeper is a non-profit organization that for many years has been involved in key legislation regarding efforts to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and its tributaries. It focuses on environmental laws to stop illegal pollution, protect salmon habitat, and challenge fossil fuel terminals.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to restore the lower Snake River federal navigation channel above Lower Granite Dam by dredging, including removing accumulated sediment near the confluence of the lower Snake and Clearwater Rivers near Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week announced a strategy for how the Biden Administration will address a reforestation backlog of four million acres on national forests and plant more than one billion trees over the next decade.
A team of scientists concluded in a recent paper that breaching four dams in the Lower Snake River Basin in Washington provides the best and only reasonable opportunity to promote recovery of key fish species, including salmon and steelhead.
Salmon and steelhead returns to the Columbia River this year have been mixed, but still are expected to be generally higher than they were in 2021. Upriver spring Chinook, summer Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon, shad and summer steelhead returns are all higher this year, according to two Columbia River Compact staff reports released this year. The exception is fall Chinook salmon, which is forecasted to have a similar run as last year’s dismal 66 percent of the 10-year average.
Water resources will fluctuate increasingly and become more and more difficult to predict in snow-dominated regions across the Northern Hemisphere by later this century, according to a comprehensive new climate change study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has designated a new “Area of Known Wolf Activity” in the Upper Deschutes River area near the border of northern Klamath and southern Deschutes counties.
The Biden administration today repealed a second Trump-era regulation that weakened habitat protections for threatened and endangered species.
Though 100 degree-plus weather is on its way next week, unanticipated cool, wet weather in May and June prompted the Washington Department of Ecology to cancel the drought declaration for Central and Eastern Washington.
The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week celebrated the return of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon eggs to the McCloud River upstream of Shasta Reservoir for the first time since the construction of the Shasta Dam in the 1940s.
California is banking on its forests to help reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But that element of the state’s climate-change solution arsenal may be in jeopardy, as new research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California’s mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures – and fewer new trees are filling the void.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
