NOAA has selected the Port of Newport, Ore., to be the new home of the agency's Marine Operations Center-Pacific beginning in 2011, pending the signing of a 20-year lease.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, and Rep. Tom Petri, R-WI, introduced the "Salmon Solutions and Planning Act" last Friday, just before Congress adjourned for the August district work period.
Regional officials say momentum is building towards the development of a long-needed plan to better coordinate the Columbia-Snake River basin's widespread and expensive salmon monitoring and evaluation activities.
The Washington Department of Ecology and Teck American Inc., of Spokane this week signed a detailed voluntary agreement under which the mining company will remove slag from an area on the upper Columbia River known as Black Sand Beach.
Saying the Bush Administration failed to follow established administrative procedure before leaving office, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Thursday announced that a plan to intensify logging in western Oregon -- known as the Western Oregon Plan Revisions -- is legally indefensible and must be withdrawn.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski this week signed legislation that authorizes funds for the potential removal of four dams in the Klamath River Basin.
Efforts to revitalize wild Willamette River steelhead and spring chinook stocks are starting to build with tests and construction this spring and summer at multi-purpose dams in the basin's upper reaches.
A federal judge in Portland has ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to re-analyze a critical habitat designation for bull trout throughout its five-state range -- Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho and Nevada.
The federal government has requested, and received, more time to decide whether it might consider changes to the strategy it completed a little over a year ago to reduce Columbia-Snake river hydro system impacts on protected salmon stocks.
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Portland Thursday claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has violated federal law by enabling floodplain development in Oregon without considering impacts on threatened and endangered fish and wildlife species.
Anne Castle has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science.
Castle will oversee water and science policy and have responsibility for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey.
A federal court this week put the U.S. Forest Service on trial, saying the agency must follow through on its plans for assuring grazing operations in Oregon's John Day River basin don't jeopardize the survival of protected steelhead or face the legal consequences.
In updating its fish and wildlife "program," the Northwest Power and Conservation Council contemplated thousands of pages of recommendations, comments on those recommendations and comments on draft amendments.
A legal attempt to force the spilling of more water at federal Columbia and Snake river dams and to enhance river flows to ease salmon migrations has run out of time, at least for the 2009 season, according to a brief filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court by a coalition of fishing and conservation groups.
President Obama said this week he intends to nominate Bob Abbey, a veteran public land policy leader and chief architect of the Great Basin Restoration Initiative, as director of the Bureau of Land Management.
The search is officially under way for a new director to lead the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
A "proposed order" filed Tuesday pledges that summertime spill operations this year to facilitate juvenile salmon passage at federal Columbia-Snake river hydro projects will mimic as closely as possible -- as a federal judge requested -- those of 2008.
No, Idaho's senior U.S. senator, Mike Crapo, is not a born-again dam breaching advocate.
NOAA Fisheries released its final biological opinion Thursday that finds the water pumping operations in California's Central Valley by the federal Bureau of Reclamation jeopardize the continued existence of salmon, steelhead and sturgeon listed under the Endangered Species Act.
A coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the recent delisting of gray wolves in Montana and Idaho, raising some of the same legal issues that blocked delisting last year.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar this week named Montanan John Tubbs, a veteran water resources administrator and policy leader, as deputy assistant secretary for Water and Science. The appointment does not require Senate confirmation.
Top officials traveled west this week to continue the Obama Administration's examination of a legally beleaguered strategy for assuring that federal dams in the Columbia River basin don't jeopardize the survival of protected salmon and steelhead.
A federal judge says more funding commitments, higher guaranteed river flows, additional scientific analysis and another look at the breaching of four dams on the lower Snake River may be needed to shore up, and make legal, the federal government's Columbia River basin salmon protection plan.
Within-year budget adjustments totaling nearly $2.3 million for six fish and wildlife projects were approved Tuesday by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
Parties to long-running litigation over the federal government's Columbia River hydro system biological opinion now have an extra 30 to 60 days to "explore whether further discussions regarding the BiOp might be productive."
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