The national economy is reenergizing, quite literally. In 2021, Americans used 5% more energy than in 2020, according to the most recent energy flow charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The Upper Columbia United Tribes secured over $3 million in funding in the Washington State supplemental budget for salmon reintroduction in the upper Columbia.
Whales are threatened by a variety of human activities off the West Coast of the United States, including fishing, ship traffic, and pollution. Overlap between these stressors can compound effects on whale populations, but are rarely addressed by current whale-protection policies in California, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
Even the High North can’t escape the global threat of plastic pollution.
The White House this week made clear it plans to be involved in Columbia River salmon recovery, saying it has engaged mediators to facilitate “public policy dialogue” with governments and stakeholders.
PacifiCorp and the Cowlitz County Public Utility District has committed to completing fish passage facilities at its dams on Washington’s North Fork Lewis River by 2028, a move that PacifiCorp says will support the recovery of coho and chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout in the river, all listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Total Bonneville Power Administration fish and wildlife costs last year (fiscal year 2021) rose 18 percent over FY2020 from $611.5 million to $744.5 million, making up about 25 percent of the power marketing agency’s wholesale power rate, according to a report to Northwest governors released for public comment by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
After two years of closure to complete the largest habitat restoration project in the history of the lower Columbia River, Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge reopens to the public on May 1. Construction on the Steigerwald Reconnection Project began in 2019 to reduce flood risk, reconnect 965 acres of Columbia River floodplain, and increase recreation opportunities at the refuge.
The Oregon Legislature has passed the Private Forest Accord, which is aimed at bringing durable protections for salmon and cold, clean water across 10 million acres of private Oregon forestland. The legislature also established the Elliott State Research Forest, intended to transform this coastal rainforest into a sanctuary for science. And the legislature allocated a first-ever river resilience funding package to protect streamflows in the face of drought.
Barry Thom leads the West Coast Region of NOAA Fisheries and is responsible for implementing NOAA Fisheries mandates under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Endangered Species Act, and Marine Mammal Protection Act along the U.S. West Coast from Washington to California.
The number of hares in a forest is a good indicator of how healthy that ecosystem is — and now there’s a better way to find out.
Mountain regions have a large potential for hydropower that cannot be harnessed effectively by conventional technologies, says the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. IIASA researcher Julian Hunt and an international team of researchers developed an innovative hydropower technology based on electric trucks that could provide a flexible and clean solution for electricity generation in mountainous regions.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued a draft environmental impact statement that says removing four Klamath River dams would provide significant benefits for spring and summer chinook salmon, coho salmon and suckers by freeing up 255 miles of river habitat upstream of the dams. Coho salmon are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Through the end of 2021, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers implemented a number of measures required by a federal court to improve conditions for protected salmon, steelhead and bull trout at its Willamette River valley dams. In addition, the Corps continued implementing other measures already in process prior to a Sept. 1, 2021 court injunction. Even more measures that will improve passage or water quality for fish will be put into motion this year, according to the federal agency’s recently released report.
Small particles from tires inhibited the growth and caused adverse behavioral changes in organisms found in freshwater and coastal estuary ecosystems, two new Oregon State University studies found.
Farming Atlantic salmon requires a high volume of wild-caught fish as feed but produces only a small percentage of the world’s farmed fish supply.
The number of legal-sized white sturgeon – 38 to 54 inches in fork length – in the lower Columbia River is trending downward, while the number of larger adult sized fish is trending upward, according to a recent stock status report.
Climate change and land-use change are projected to make wildfires more frequent and intense, with a global increase of extreme fires of up to 14 per cent by 2030, 30 per cent by the end of 2050 and 50 per cent by the end of the century, according to a new report by the United Nations.
Research led by Oregon State University shows that fires are more likely to burn their way into national forests than out of them.
If you are a wolf living in Yellowstone National Park, bears mess with you. They show up uninvited and steal kills from your pack. And when scavenging bears drive you away from tasty carcasses, you and your fellow wolves will – strangely enough – kill less often.
The first atlas to measure the movement and thickness of the world’s glaciers gives a clearer, but mixed picture of the globe’s ice-bound freshwater resources, according to researchers from the Institute of Environmental Geosciences and Dartmouth College.
An annual salmon survival study by the Fish Passage Center says increasing smolt-to-adult returns to recovery levels for Snake River salmon and steelhead will require breaching the Lower Snake River dams and increasing spill at lower Columbia River dams.
The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs celebrated the New Year by exercising its option to purchase a larger share of the Pelton Round Butte hydroelectric project on the Deschutes River in central Oregon.
For the second consecutive year, Oregon and Washington are expecting a big run of eulachon into the Columbia River, and so approved a limited conservation-level commercial test fishery through February.
Hatchery-raised steelhead trout have offspring that are good at gaining size under hatchery conditions but don’t survive as well in streams as steelhead whose parents are wild fish, new research by Oregon State University shows.
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