|
|
|
| Click here to download this recommendation. (24 K) | Click to comment on this recommendation. |
Mark Walker, Director of Public Affairs April
18, 2000
Northwest Power Planning Council
851 SW Sixth Avenue
Suite 1100
Portland OR 97204
Dear Council Members:
There are several proposed changes that will help your program and will help recover salmon. I will cover those items below.
Regional Approach: I am glad to see that this will take place. It will help adaptive management as that is a process that demands large scale experiments in time and space and big, bold measures. A regional approach makes sense because landscapes will reflect similar environmental and landuse constraints on the ecological functioning of watersheds. All other things being equal, similar types of limiting factors may be operating and a concentrated effort over landscape scales to reduce that influence becomes possible. The second factor is that landscape should be populated by genetically similar stocks, thereby favoring large, coordinated management experiments. Alternatively, regions could be defined by the criteria of genetic stock structure or by phenotypic diversity. Management will then be driven directly by concerns for the persistence of genetic groups using the appropriate metapopulation models (Levins’ model, source-sink model, core-satellite model).
Regardless, the important point of the regional approach is that real adaptive management, not creeping incrementalism, becomes a possibility. To repeat myself, adaptive management will require bold management policies across large spatial scales or the signal will be too weak and recovery efforts will appear to be equivocal as recent work by L.J. Bledsoe and T.N. Pearsons and there colleagues show.
Rolling Three Year Review Cycle:This is really important. The fundamental issue is that there are considerable gaps in our understanding in how to recover salmon. That is obvious. Therefore any information concerning lessons of scientific management should be communicated to the scientific community. The public is concerned about best available science and they should be. Best available science is peer reviewed publication in a journal. We have journals, several of them, specifically addressing management issues, e.g., The North American Journal of Fisheries Management, Ecological Applications, Journal of Applied Ecology, Conservation Biology, Conservation Ecology, etc. There is no excuse for a management/research group not publishing the results of their management activities. Did it succeed? Did it fail? Was the signal too weak? Was success or failure predicated by a particular circumstance? There are groups in the Columbia Basin that publish their work. Others have spent tens of millions and have not. We have to ask why? If a group is not getting the job done or have had no time for analysis, that speaks of failure and that program should be phased out. Resources are short.
Goals: Goals are important and I am pleased that goals have been established with definite time lines. On the other hand, this is insufficient in and of itself. If the goal is missed, effort should be redoubled to make up for lost time. This will mean a re-evaluation of the program. Are sacred cows being protected? Are small, politically safe steps being taken rather than bold moves that pose social, economic and political risk? At some point, if failure continues, nothing is sacrosanct. Either that or admit to the public that the will is not there to save salmon.
Multispecies Management Framework: At last! Many of the problems concerning salmon result from the distortion of community structure and interactions as food and species- interaction webs are warped from former "normal" states. For example, the coastwide decline of Pacific lamprey, the intensive harvest of walleye pollack, and whiting, a depleted ground fisheries have depleted alternative prey for sea birds and marine mammals. Now, where previous studies indicated that salmon predation was minimal, predation can be a serious threat. Of course, most hatchery fishes act differently than wild fishes and die as a consequent at higher rates (see Caspian tern data). The multispecies approach recognizes that a broader ecological context is more important than narrowly focussed technological "fixes".
Request for Proposals: The value of ISAB to speed-up recovery efforts will be increased as they are given responsibility to re-evaluate the state of knowledge and edit the framework as time passes. By doing so, they can help NWPPC identify critical areas of research and help shape requests for proposals. This will lead to a free market competition of ideas rather than the limited distribution of centrally planned efforts by a limited group of insiders as presently conducted.
Sincerely yours,
Hiram W. Li
Professor and Assistant Leader