We are willing to work closely with the development of the regional PIT plan and regional assessements of tagging needs and priorities.

With respect to support for life cycle modeling for climate change assessments, the proposal included the following under the emerging issues section.

Climate change will likely result in: (1) early peak flows, (2) a decrease in peak flows, and (3) an increase in water temperature (ISAB 2007).  The ISAB proposed that climate change will have the most significant impacts on the early life stages of fall Chinook salmon, which rear in mainstem habitats.  In summary, the ISAB hypothesized that climate change will lead to: (1) earlier fry emergence, (2) a smaller size at emergence, (3) earlier departure from protective rearing habitat, (4) reduced survival due to changes in rearing behavior due to predation, (5) increased metabolism and decreased growth if food resources are limited in less optimal habitat in down-river reaches, (6) forebay delay, (7) decreased smolt survival, and (8) a reduction in life history diversity if late summer temperatures become lethal and kill that later summer migrants and those fish destined to become fall migrants or to overwinter in reservoirs.  This proposal takes climate change and predation into account by fitting stock recruitment functions to predict changes in adult and juvenile abundance from covariates derived from empirical data collected on stream flow, temperature, and ocean conditions.

Project leader Connor is a member and researcher on the AMIP steering comittee and has already attended the opening coordination meeting where state of the art climate change models were presented and discussed in detail.  We did not fully develop a climate section in our proposal because we knew in advance we would be participants in AMIP and that AMIP would take the lead on the climate change issue.  We will continue to participate in AMIP and provide our knowledge and fish data to the true experts on climate change to avoid duplication of effort and provide the best product for the region.