The Canadian government last week announced a $647 million strategy to save Pacific salmon, aiming to stop the declines now while helping rebuild populations over the longer term.
At the second public workshop of the Columbia Basin Collaborative, the four Northwest states laid out a way forward to achieve regional consensus on how to rebuild threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead stocks and advance the goals developed by the Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force.
Chum salmon, now listed as threatened, once returned to the Columbia River in huge numbers, with half a million to a million fish every year spawning in tributaries from near the river’s mouth and as far up the river as Celilo Falls, which was inundated when The Dalles Dam was built just downstream.
The timeline to review 124 Bonneville Power Administration-funded hatchery and habitat projects was laid out for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council at its meeting this week.
The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service have released a plan the agencies say will “improve and strengthen implementation of the Endangered Species Act.”
Tule and bright fall chinook salmon in 2020 spawned in large numbers downstream of the site where PacifiCorp’s Condit Dam stood on the White Salmon River. But after nearly 10 years since the dam was breached, none spawned upstream of the old dam site, according to the preliminary findings in a recent report by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Is the availability of water to meet all instream (flows for fish) and out-of-stream demands vulnerable to expected changes in climate and population growth in eastern Washington?
Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) – which is associated with kidney and liver damage in Chinook salmon – is continually being transmitted between open-net salmon farms and wild juvenile Chinook salmon in British Columbia waters, according to a new genomics analysis published this week in Science Advances.
A panel of scientists completed their review of two hatchery programs that are a part of a larger effort to recover threatened Lower Columbia River chum salmon, saying the projects meet their scientific review criteria, but on a conditional basis.
Another “Columbia Basin Collaborative” organizational workshop has been scheduled for next month for more discussions on finding a better way to manage and improve Columbia/Snake River salmon recovery. Such talk comes just as Washington’s governor and the state’s senior U.S. senator issued a joint statement saying “we do not believe the Simpson proposal can be included in the proposed federal infrastructure package.”
With declining returns of Pacific lamprey to the Columbia River basin, tribes are turning to artificial propagation, supplementation and translocation to boost lamprey numbers and move the fish back into historic spawning grounds.
Researchers have found enough suitable habitat for more than 32,000 spring/fall chinook salmon to spawn in a section of upper Lake Roosevelt to the border with Canada where current is swifter than it is near Grand Coulee Dam – but that’s only if the fish can make it upstream of Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams.
A new study by researchers from Simon Fraser University and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans reveals the trade-offs of fish biodiversity--its costs and benefits to mixed-stock fisheries--and points to a potential way to harness the benefits while avoiding costs to fishery performance.
After one year of planning, working with state, federal and private landowners, and three weeks of heavy lifting – with helicopters – the Yakama Nation completed a project that dropped logs into seven Yakima River tributaries to create natural habitat and cover for salmon and steelhead smolts.
If the Bonneville Power Administration’s fish and wildlife budget is to remain flat – no increases through 2028 – that could impact an important maintenance program that keeps juvenile salmon and steelhead from being stranded in irrigation ditches, according to Idaho and Washington fish screen managers.
Idaho Fish and Game released more than 1 million endangered Snake River sockeye salmon smolts from its Sawtooth Hatchery directly into the Upper Salmon River April 30 rather than transporting and then releasing the smolts into Redfish Lake Creek, which is normally the last stop for the smolts as they begin their downstream migration to the ocean.
From the Pacific Northwest to the Rocky Mountains, summers in the West are marked by wildfires and smoke. New research from the University of Utah ties the worsening trend of extreme poor air quality events in Western regions to wildfire activity, with growing trends of smoke impacting air quality clear into September.
An unprecedented combination of strong easterly winds and low humidity coupled with prolonged drought conditions drove the spread of catastrophic wildfires in the Oregon Cascades last September, a new study has found.
An international, multidisciplinary team that includes faculty members from The University of Texas at Arlington has published a paper in the journal Philosophical Psychology that wades into the debate about whether fish feel pain.
Seven conservation groups filed April 14 in Multnomah County Circuit Court a petition seeking to stop logging by Oregon Department of Forestry contractors of trees burned in wildfires last summer in the Santiam River watershed in Oregon. The logging is in process.
Eight years of spawning surveys in White Salmon River tributaries is showing the progression of how naturally-returning steelhead are repopulating the river after removal of Condit Dam in 2011.
Humans cannot live on protein alone – even for the ancient indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest whose diet was once thought to be almost all salmon.
What are the next steps for the proposed regional forum, the Columbia Basin Collaborative, which held an organizational workshop in February? Organizers of this new collaborative effort aimed at recovering salmonid species in the Columbia River Basin this week issued a summary of the workshop results and what might come next.
An important forage fish that spawns in late summer and early spring in the lower Columbia River is returning this year in higher numbers than was originally forecasted.
Older Chinook salmon may die in the ocean more often than previously thought, according to a life cycle simulation created by Alaska researchers.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
