1994 Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program
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1994 Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program |
| Council document 94-55 | |
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Contents
4.0 Components of the Program Framework
4.1 Salmon and Steelhead Goal: Double Salmon and Steelhead Runs Without Loss of Biological Diversity
4.2 Salmon And Steelhead Research And Evaluation
4.3 Rebuilding Targets, Performance Standards and Monitoring
To be effective, the fish and wildlife program must be more than a collection of measures. Individual efforts must be coordinated, and measures must be integrated into an overall plan designed to achieve specific goals and objectives.
To achieve this coordination, the salmon and steelhead sections of this program do three things:
First, the program is focused and organized around a framework. This framework consists of an overall goal (of doubling salmon and steelhead runs without loss of biological diversity) and rebuilding targets for Snake River salmon populations. The program also provides a process for developing additional rebuilding targets, salmon and steelhead rebuilding schedules, survival targets and performance standards to track change for individual measures. The goal and rebuilding targets, along with the other program measures, should guide the region toward salmon and steelhead rebuilding, while important work is done to complete the framework.
Second, the program establishes a coordinated implementation process (see Section 3) in which implementing agencies, working through the Bonneville Power Administration's implementation planning process, can systematize and prioritize the implementation of program measures. Recognizing that the Council is a planning and oversight entity, not an implementing entity, action on program measures will be managed by implementing agencies, not the Council. The Council will monitor and comment on this process, offer help where requested, and may, through additional program amendments, establish new measures or priorities.
Third, reflecting the Council's longstanding commitment to adaptive management, the program establishes a process to monitor and evaluate program implementation in a way that adds systematically to the region's knowledge of salmon and steelhead recovery (see Section 3).
During the 1994 amendment process, the Council solicited further recommendations, regarding framework elements but few were received. Following the decision in NRIC v. Northwest Power Planning Council, the Council sought further advice from the fish and wildlife managers on the analytical framework. This resulted in a proposal from the managers, which the Council circulated for comment. While the resulting comment was valuable, it was not possible to complete the framework on the basis of the comments. The Council will continue to work with the fish and wildlife managers and others to develop the elements of the framework, and will consider amendments to the program when that work is more fully developed.
The Council appreciates the preliminary efforts of the fishery managers to further define biological objectives and other framework elements reflected in the recent submission by the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority. The Council looks forward to additional refinements that are anticipated in the spring of 1995 and thereafter. The Authority's submission noted the importance of a program that has as its biological objective the assured protection and restoration of the productivity of the fish and wildlife resource and produces measurable results. It called for a fishery resource that is viable, sustainable and biologically diverse in the long term and can meet tribal, commercial and recreational harvest needs.
The Authority also pulled together a number of threads throughout the program and identified biological objectives that provide for survival improvements and production improvements. Juvenile survival improvement strategies outlined by the Authority for the tributaries, mainstem and estuary include: maintaining stream and riparian habitat programs; minimizing travel times, bypass losses, predation and delay at projects; and maximizing fish passage efficiencies. For the adult segment of the salmon life cycle in the ocean and the Columbia River, the Authority suggested survival improvements that include: increasing adult migration rates and minimizing delays; managing straying; maintaining resting pools and spawning gravel; meeting escapement goals; meeting recruit/survival ratios; minimizing by-catch; and managing harvest. To improve production, the Authority noted the importance of meeting broodstock needs; managing interactions with naturally spawning fish; conducting hatchery audits; maximizing improved release strategies and natural habitat releases; and meeting escapement and seeding targets.
Taken together, these objectives and strategies are reflected in the statements of biological purpose in this program and, with the Authority's expressed commitment to work with the Council, will provide important direction for the continued efforts to flesh out the overall program framework.
The following Section 4.0 is a largely unchanged version of Appendix A of the Strategy for Salmon. It has been brought into the body of the program to reflect the importance the Council places on framework development. Pending further work on the framework, in addition to the rebuilding targets adopted in 1992, the Council adopted recommendations for biological and operational objectives for the mainstem and other parts of the program where such objectives were clearly based on the recommendations the Council received.
