The Northwest Power and Conservation Council this week recommended spending $500,000 during fiscal year 2007 to further the goals of the Yakama Nation's Yakima Side Channels fish and wildlife project.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council continues to mull whether it should officially respond to Bonneville Power Administration Feb. 26 fish and wildlife project funding decisions that strayed in many respects from the Council's desires.
Project data reporting and collection must be shored up before a valid assessment can be made about the biological benefit to be earned with the planned $143 million annual investment through the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's Columbia River basin fish and wildlife program.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council, NOAA Fisheries, and the Bonneville Power Administration last week unveiled a new Internet-based tool that provides access to a vast reservoir of information about fish, wildlife, and water in the Pacific Northwest.
A 16-year stint with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council ends this week (March 9) for fish and wildlife division director Doug Marker, who resigned recently to pursue other career opportunities.
Caspian terns' consumption of juvenile salmonids grew last year, as did the sheer numbers of another avian predator -- doubled-crested cormorants -- in the Columbia River estuary and elsewhere, according to a draft research report released this week.
The attorney who won a landmark court case that threatened to undercut the threatened and endangered status of many salmon and steelhead runs on the West Coast died Sunday.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council on Wednesday decided to seek assurances that long-term fish and wildlife funding agreements hammered out in federal court proceedings adhere to provisions of the Northwest Power Act.
Poorly managed marine fisheries are in trouble around the world, researchers say, while ecosystem-based management is a powerful idea that in theory could help ensure sustainable catches - but too often there’s a gap in translating broad concepts into specific action in the oceans that successfully meets these larger goals.
Farms in the semiarid western United States produce a large portion of the nation's food and fiber, most with irrigation. Yet, as available water supplies shrink and competing demands for water increase, western agriculture faces an uncertain future.
The latest scientific information in, potentially, five complex subject areas will be reviewed and digested later this year when the Northwest Power and Conservation Council convenes a science/policy conference as preparation for planned Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program amendments.
Bonneville Power Administration officials said that the bottom lines are essentially the same, but Northwest Power and Conservation Council members left their meeting Wednesday with budgetary and legal questions about a fish and wildlife project funding package unveiled by the federal power marketing agency.
Technology that has been field tested by tracking Columbia Basin salmon as they migrate north along the Pacific coast will be refined and expanded worldwide thanks to $45 million in grants announced Monday by Canada's Foundation for Innovation.
A "good effort" to clarify policy issues and narrow areas of scientific disagreement is ongoing, but federal agencies can't promise that all will be happy at the end of the long-running collaboration with Columbia River basin tribes and states on the intricacies of a new hydrosystem salmon protection plan.
The hatchery vs. wild debate continues on several fronts with legal arguments concluded in at least two lawsuits that challenge the NOAA Fisheries Service's new method for listing salmon and steelhead under the deserve Endangered Species Act.
The Army Corps of Engineers will hold four meetings around the Northwest to collect public input on its forthcoming study seeking ways to reduce the amount of sediment that reaches the Lower Snake River and its reservoirs.
Assessing the state’s “inadequate water supply,” identifying potential storage sites and analyzing conservation opportunities would be part of the Oregon Water Supply and Conservation Initiative in a policy option package proposed by the Oregon Water Resources Department.
A draft review of Oregon's Eagle Creek National Fish Hatchery concludes the coho program there needs to eventually steer toward native broodstock, and its winter steelhead program may require termination if the out-of-basin products pose significant risk to protected, native Clackamas River stock.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials on Monday announced a formal proposal to remove legal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies, a change that will proceed with or without Wyoming.
A 20-year survey of conservation science shows a disturbing disconnect between the world’s most pressing ecological issues and what researchers are actually studying, with some less serious problems getting the most attention while more critical concerns get largely ignored.
A federal appellate court on Wednesday – in response to a request by Columbia River basin tribes and fishing and conservation groups – ordered the Bonneville Power Administration to "continue its existing contractual arrangements to fund and support" the Fish Passage Center.
Columbia Basin tribes and fishing and conservation groups are jubilant, and Idaho's senior U.S. senator is frustrated, over a Wednesday order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit requiring continued federal funding for the Portland-based Fish Passage Center.
The federal judge who in 2001 triggered a three-year reassessment of West Coast salmon and steelhead Endangered Species Act listings is once again fielding arguments about how hatchery produced fish should be accounted for in evaluating species status.
An Idaho water users group this week cited results from a 2006 study as proof that migrating juvenile salmon do not suffer ill effects from passing down through four lower Snake River federal hydroprojects, and nor does barging the young fish through the hydrosystem hinder their chances of surviving to adulthood.
The federal agency charged with protecting Northwest salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act today approved a far-reaching plan to recover threatened chinook in Puget Sound.
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