Habitat Limiting Factors Reports

1
Habitat Limiting Factors Reports

• How they were used for the SOS report

2
LFA Background

• 1998-2003
• Named by the Legislature
• Provided technical basis to choose the most
  beneficial projects. What to do to benefit
  fish.
• Used by local planning groups (WRIAs) who formed
  citizen committees. Committees combined their
  expertise with the LFAs to form strategies.
  What we can do.
• Last two years, WRIA strategies combined by
  region to form regional recovery plans. These
  also integrated hatchery and harvest information.

3
Habitat Categories

• Access
• Floodplain wetlands, side-channel, hardening
• Riparian age/species of tree, buffer width
• Sediment quantity, quality, stability, road
  density
• Instream LWD, pool quality, pool quantity
• Water Quality
• Flow
• Estuarine/Nearshore

4
LFA Process

• For each habitat category, all available data
  were assembled and summarized.
• Habitat results were compared to standards to
  give ratings of poor, fair, good, or data gap.
• Recommendations were developed to prioritize the
  greatest problems by watershed.

5
Ratings Standards

• Provide a habitat rating for each category or
  sub-category.
• When available, ratings were based upon accepted
  standards such as watershed analysis, NOAA
  Fisheries, and Wild Salmonid Policy.
• Ratings were expressed as good, fair, poor, or
  data gap.
• Some reports labeled ratings with a qualitative
  note such as type of data that supported the
  rating.
• End result is a report that has a summary table
  of ratings by habitat category by stream or
  stream reach. Example.

6
State of the Salmon Report

• Purpose of SOS report.
• The LFA data were used for the habitat condition
  colors in the 2004 SOS report.
• SOS habitat was defined as floodplain, riparian,
  sediment, and instream conditions. The other
  habitat components were supplied by other
  sources.
• The LFA data not only had to be rolled by from 4
  major categories to 1 category, but also had to
  be rolled up from stream to WRIA scale for the
  SOS report.
• The methodology for this rollup was a product of
  the SOS technical committee.

7
Rollup from Stream to WRIA

• First, the rating was rolled up by WRIA for each
  of the categories. Methodology frequency of
  stream ratings. The most frequent rating was the
  WRIA rating. If another rating was within 20,
  it would be the secondary rating.
• Few available ratings resulted in a data gap for
  the WRIA in that category.
• Example on following page.

8
Rollup from Categories to Single Habitat Rating

• The poor, fair, good ratings are converted to
  numbers and averaged per category.
• As long as there are at least 3 categories with
  ratings, then the category ratings are averaged
  for a final numerical rating.
• The numerical rating was converted back to a
  good, fair, poor, or data gap and used for the
  colored maps in the SOS report.