Salmon recovery does not just mean more fish

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• Salmon recovery does not just mean more fish
• Management decisions are driven by politics
  logisticsscience can only contribute if we
  provide technically defensible options that
  include bounds of certainty

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• Using ecology to help solve conservation
  problems informing salmon recovery
• Identifying population structure
• Estimating risk of extinction
• Prioritizing management actions to help the fish

Goals
How to achieve goals?
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Technical needs for informing recovery planning

• Identify
• population viability criteria,
• ESU viability criteria.
• Determine causes of declines
• Offer technical tools to explore alternative
  routes to achieving recovery goals and how to
  document progress

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Recovery goals include four components 1)
abundance 2) productivity 3) diversity 4)
spatial structure
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Diversity Definition - Variation in
characteristics of fish (e.g. age composition,
spawn timing, migration pathways, genetic
composition.) Rationale - Provides flexibility to
persist in the presence of short- and long-term
variation in the environment.
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Spatial Structure Definition - The geographic
distribution of fish Rationale - Widely
distributed population spreads risk
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• Identify
• population viability criteria,
• ESU viability criteria.
• Determine causes of declines
• Offer technical tools to explore alternative
  routes to achieving recovery goals and how to
  document progress

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What actions are needed to achieve salmon
recovery?

• The role of science is to create technically
  defensible options to answer this question

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Achieving needed improvements

• Habitat
• Harvest
• Hatcheries
• Hydropower
• Ocean and climate

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Habitat fixes conceptual overview of watershed
function

• Landscape processes and land use affect habitat
• Habitat affects abundance, productivity, spatial
  distribution and diversity of salmon

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Habitat-related questions for recovery planning

• Where have habitat-forming processes been altered
  and resulted in habitat loss or reduction in
  quality?
• How have reductions in the amount or quality of
  habitat altered the status (abundance,
  productivity, diversity, spatial structure) of
  listed salmon?
• What (alternative sets of) restoration or
  protection actions are necessary for recovery in
  each watershed?

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Ocean conditions, climate change, rate of human
development, etc.
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