The Columbia River Basin's trail-breaking Clearwater subbasin planning committee, and Northwest Power and Conservation Council, were left to ponder next steps after their product of more than three years of work was deemed scientifically unjustified.
In the four weeks since a cougar killed one cyclist and attacked another in California, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has continued to pursue an aggressive strategy to reduce human conflicts with the Evergreen State's own population of big cats.
The Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle has released for comment the first of several draft documents intended to address whether improvements to estuarine and tributary habitats can improve the population status of salmonids listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Administration officials visiting the Columbia River basin last week took the time to visit what they say is a shining example of the federal/local cooperation they feel necessary to hasten the recovery of salmon and steelhead stocks.
President Bush submitted a 2005 environmental budget this week that the Administration says includes the highest level of funding ever requested by a President for high-priority environment and natural resource programs.
The U.S. Supreme Court was sent a request Tuesday to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that a group of Washington farmers say could dramatically affect water rights throughout the West.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton today announced that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is awarding 79 grants, totaling nearly $14 million, to help 60 federally recognized Indian tribes conserve and recover endangered, threatened and at-risk species and other wildlife on tribal lands.
Northwest tribes were awarded nearly $2 million in grants.
Citing the need to capitalize on the good fortune provided by the Pacific Ocean, administration officials say President Bush will purse increased funding in fiscal 2005 for a program that stresses partnerships at the local level to do good works for Columbia River basin salmon habitat.
Wildlife biologists are scaling remote areas of the Cascade mountains to determine why Washington's population of mountain goats is declining.
The mountain goat research project is detailed with color photos in an updated version of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's online Fish and Wildlife Science magazine on the department's website at http://wdfw.wa.gov/science/index.html
The financial windfall could be as high as $77 million and the biological loss as high as an estimated 19,000 Columbia River basin adult fall chinook salmon on average annually if hydrosystem "spill" for fish passage is turned off in July and August, according to analysis released this week.
Conservation groups and Pacific Coast commercial fishermen filed a lawsuit Jan. 16 asking a federal judge to declare illegal a NOAA Fisheries' biological opinion governing the operation of Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects in the Snake River basin.
The Nez Perce Tribe last week initiated a lawsuit against three federal agencies in an attempt stall a plan to harvest 42 million board feet of timber in north-central Idaho Lochsa River drainage.
Portland General Electric will spend up to $9 million to improve anadromous fish passage at its four Clackamas River dams, beginning with the circa 1911 River Mill Dam near Estacada, Ore.
According to the draft assessment, a total of 1,328, or 56 percent, of
1998's 2,362 polluted-water listings have been placed into other categories.
Fully 19 percent no longer show evidence of pollution. Still, because more
waters are being tested, the overall number of polluted water segments on
the list has increased slightly, from 2,362 to 2,682.
Fearing that it would loose a flood of similar proposals, the Columbia River basin's Regional Coordinating Group this week chose not to endorse a request from the state of Oregon that the John Day planning group be allowed to stretch the deadline for submittal of its developing subbasin plan to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
An independent economic report prepared as a part of Washington's Columbia River Initiative process says that scenarios in which as much as one million acre feet of additional water would be diverted from the river would have "moderately large negative impacts on hydropower production" but "very large positive impacts on the agricultural economy."
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife plans to release up to 30 bighorn sheep on its Chelan Butte Wildlife Area in Chelan County this winter to restore an historic population.
NOAA Fisheries has released for public comment four preliminary drafts of “Technical Memoranda,” or “white papers” that summarize some of the key science to be used in rewriting the 2000 Biological Opinion for the federal Columbia River hydropower system.
An aggressive tribal supplementation program, and good timing, has resulted in a burgeoning fall chinook return to the Snake River, where populations teetered for decades on the brink of extinction.
The Portland District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to receive about $186 million of the $4.7 billion national budget for civil works projects included in the Fiscal Year 2004 Energy and Water Development Appropriation Act recently signed by President Bush.
The Corps’ Portland District will use the funds for projects in the Rogue, Willamette, Columbia, and Cowlitz river basins.
The Oregon Environmental Quality Commission approved new Oregon water quality standards, including standards for temperature in streams and lakes, proposed by the state's Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ delivered the new standards to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Dec. 10.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit that has forced the federal government to rethink its Federal Columbia River Power System salmon protection plan continue to press in U.S. District Court for a broader interpretation of that plan's responsibility.
The document in question is the FCRPS biological opinion, which was issued by NOAA Fisheries late in 2000 but is now under reconstruction as a part of a remand ordered by Judge James A. Redden early this past summer.
A federal Libby Dam operations plan designed to avoid jeopardizing endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon is being reworked even as new research shows the long-lived creatures are on a steeper slide toward extinction than was thought just a few years ago.
As part of an effort to prepare for the court-ordered revision of the 2000 Biological Opinion for the federal Columbia River hydropower system, the National Marine Fisheries Service has sent a request for information from Tribes and states about non-federal salmon habitat actions that might be included in the new “BiOp.”
David Allen admittedly has only just begun to burrow into the complexities of those issues in his immediate environment, the Columbia River basin, and other locales in the Pacific Region. But he agreed this week to offer some of his first impressions about the efforts of his agency, and of others, to maintain and restore the Columbia Basin's fish and wildlife resources.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
