Beavers are often translocated to restore populations in areas, reduce their conflicts with humans and to take advantage of their ability to improve ecosystems.
Federal storage dams in the Willamette River basin are at an average of just 37 percent of capacity, hit hard this year by drought. Overall, they should be at nearly twice that – 68 percent capacity. And there is little in the weather forecast that will change that over the next few weeks.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week announced a final rule to list the Franklin’s bumble bee as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. It’s the first ESA listing for a bumble bee in the West.
Nearing the end of the 2021 sockeye salmon migration in the Snake River basin, river managers and the state of Idaho have adopted a hybrid approach to ensure as many of the endangered adult migrants complete their long journey up the Salmon River and into the Stanley Basin.
An informal coalition of fisheries-focused conservation groups is urging the fish and wildlife commissions in Oregon and Washington to step up to save summer steelhead in a year when their returns are at the lowest numbers since Bonneville Dam was built and in a year when water temperatures threaten their migration.
A long-running program that partners with ranchers and farmers in riparian areas to improve floodplain habitat on private lands and create climate change resiliency for salmon and steelhead has been successful across Oregon, Idaho and Washington, all leveraging Bonneville Power Administration fish and wildlife funding.
Researchers have mapped out the true extent of habitat loss for salmon in the Lower Fraser River, one of the most important spawning and rearing grounds for Pacific salmon in British Columbia.
NOAA Fisheries has announced that it is expanding designated critical habitat for endangered Southern Resident killer whales to include coastal waters from Washington state to Monterey Bay in California.
Increased abundance of salmon in the inland waters of the Salish Sea increased the odds of endangered Southern Resident killer whales capturing salmon as prey, but increased speeds of nearby boats did just the opposite, according to new research findings.
Greater buffer zones around bodies of water and more consistent enforcement of water protection regulations are needed to reduce agriculture-based pollution in the Western U.S., a recent review from Oregon State University found.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada have released their joint “The Health of the Salish Sea Report” analyzing 10 indicators of the health of the Salish Sea, the shared estuary that includes the Strait of Juan De Fuca, Puget Sound, and Georgia Basin.
U.S. District Court Judge Marco Hernandez Wednesday outlined in a draft order Wednesday actions that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must take to protect threatened wild spring chinook and winter steelhead at its Willamette Valley dams. The case has been in the courts for three years.
While agreeing to at least investigate most of a suite of water saving and temperature improvement modifications at lower Snake River dams proposed by Oregon last week, at this week’s meeting of the interagency Technical Management Team the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said one thing it can’t do because of safety concerns is to lower the pool level at Lower Granite Dam.
The Columbia Basin Collaborative this week more clearly defined who in the region is invited to participate in a process aimed at improving salmon and steelhead recovery in the Columbia River basin.
The respiratory performance of wild Pacific sockeye salmon functions normally even when infected with piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), according to a new study released this week.
Unregulated contaminants that enter bodies of waters from wastewater treatment plants have biological impacts on fish species, such as chinook salmon, as well as on the endangered population of Southern Resident Orca whales in Puget Sound, according to a recent paper released late last week by the Washington Department of Ecology.
In a review of a controversial 2020 research paper which asserted that chinook salmon decline in West Coast-wide rivers, including the Columbia River, was the same whether a river was dammed or not, scientists said the study’s analysis does indeed support such a claim.
The collapse in abundance of five salmon stocks in 2020 in the North Pacific Ocean is likely due to a long-lasting heat wave in the Pacific and the unusually high abundance of pink salmon in the northern Pacific in 2018 and 2019, according to a report to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission in late May.
Twenty-one members of the Northwest congressional delegation are urging President Biden to enlist a “top-level White House led strategy” to ensure efforts to modernize the Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada is a top priority for the new Administration. The lawmakers say under the current treaty the U.S. is “vastly overpaying Canada.”
The federal agency that oversees dams in the U.S. has approved the transfer of the hydroelectric license for four Klamath River dams from PacifiCorp, a Portland-based utility owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to a nonprofit set up solely for the purpose of removing the dams.
The Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership has already exceeded its goal to restore 25,000 acres of habitat in the lower Columbia River by 2025 and is now approaching 30,000 restored acres since the year 2000, according to the nonprofit chartered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Washington Department of Ecology this week denied “without prejudice” a water quality permit for the proposed Goldendale Energy Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project along the Columbia River in Klickitat County.
Smolt-To-Adult returns. SARs. The BENCHMARK of Columbia/Snake River basin salmon and steelhead recovery. And in recent years the SARs benchmark – tagged, tracked fish-- is screaming bad news for Snake River salmon and steelhead. Bringing these fish back from the brink as the regional climate warms requires urgency.
Since at least 2011, biologists have trapped chinook and sockeye salmon and summer steelhead at Pelton Dam on the Deschutes River and transported the fish upstream to Lake Billy Chinook for spawning in an effort to reintroduce the fish upstream of the dam.
The global abundance of salmon in the Pacific Ocean in 2020 based on commercial catch was the lowest since 1982 and in North America the catch was the lowest since 1977, despite a record number of hatchery releases the year before, according to a report released in May 2021 by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission of Vancouver B.C.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
