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 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.

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.

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.