The Independent Scientific Review Panel (ISRP) has been reviewing projects under the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program (Program) for almost three decades. In 2025, the ISRP completed a retrospective review of habitat protection and restoration projects in the Program to assess progress and identify both challenges and successes. The review looks at several major project components, including planning and prioritization, implementation methods, research, monitoring, and evaluation. Overall, the ISRP found significant improvements in all the major components and commended the Program’s restoration efforts for evolving and expanding over time in a manner consistent with the science. However, challenges remain, particularly for understanding watershed scale restoration responses and research, monitoring, and evaluation. Specifically, the ISRP continues to recommend improvements to the research, monitoring, and evaluation component in order to better understand how much restoration is needed to produce biologically meaningful results and under what conditions effects achieve the greatest benefits.
The report benefited from and is intended to complement the Council’s 1980-2022 Retrospective Report, Program Tracker, and categorical assessments.
