A Seattle federal district court judge ruled this week that NOAA Fisheries’ authorization of the Southeast Alaska troll fishery violated the Endangered Species Act by approving harvest levels that fail to protect Southern Resident killer whales and wild chinook listed under the ESA.
The Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are partnering to protect winter-run Chinook salmon in a crucial year of their life cycle at the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery at Shasta Lake during the third consecutive drought year in California.
Under a directive from Congress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evaluated the feasibility of reintroducing sea otters to their historical range along the West Coast of the contiguous United States. The Service focused the assessment on northern California and Oregon, where potential sea otter reintroduction would have the greatest conservation value.
Oregon State University scientists are proposing management changes on western federal lands that they say would result in more wolves and beavers and would re-establish ecological processes. They suggest reducing by 29 percent the amount of western public lands allotted annually for livestock grazing.
As glaciers worldwide retreat due to climate change, managers of national parks need to know what’s on the horizon to prepare for the future. A new study from the University of Washington and the National Park Service measures 38 years of change for glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park, a stunning jewel about two hours south of Anchorage.
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.
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