Comment:

This is an ambitious, well-conceived restoration project that covers a broad geographical area in the lower Columbia River. The project includes habitat, fish propagation, and monitoring components and it addresses the critical conservation need to protect and recover lower Columbia River chum salmon populations, which are ESA-listed. Recovery actions have been prioritized by the proponents and their regional partners. Monitoring and evaluation has been adequate to demonstrate that life cycle productivity (adult returns per spawner, R/S) is typically higher for fish spawning in constructed channels than for fish collected as hatchery broodstock to produce progeny for release as fed-fry, and intermediate for fish that spawn naturally in Duncan Creek. However, productivity is highly variable from year to year, and greater than 1 in only ~50% of brood years, indicating the population may not yet be self-sustainable. Overall chum salmon abundance in the ESU is variable but generally increasing since the low in 2008. The proponents have made good progress toward the overall goal of chum salmon recovery and are working with ODFW to develop a coordinated recovery effort for chum salmon in both Washington and Oregon tributary populations.

1. Objectives, Significance to Regional Programs, and Technical Background

In 1999, chum salmon in the lower Columbia River were listed as threatened under the ESA, leading to the recovery plan for chum salmon and the efforts by this restoration project. Three broad/general objectives are clearly stated and partially quantitative: (1) provide habitat restoration and chum salmon spawning channel development in Washington State tributaries of the lower Columbia River, (2) create multiple self-sustaining spawning populations (>1,000 adult returns annually) in each of three strata (Coastal, Cascade, Gorge) in the lower Columbia River and its Washington tributaries, (3) implement monitoring that provides accurate and precise estimates of data for viable salmon population (VSP) analyses and data for managing and evaluating enhancement projects. Project objectives and anticipated results closely follow applicable goals presented in the Council's Fish and Wildlife Program. Anticipated outcomes for biological objectives are not specified explicitly in the proposal, but one general expectation is to follow FCRPS prioritization criteria and HSRG guidelines to establish self-sustaining populations in each of the three strata. The proposal states that abundance targets for each population were included in Table 5 of the original proposal, but they were not shown in the current proposal. Results from ongoing chum salmon recovery efforts indicate that environmental conditions during spawning, incubation, fry migration and ocean residence can have substantial effects on productivity (R/S values), and this makes it difficult to predict when desired abundances might be achieved.

2. Results and Adaptive Management

The proposal provides a comprehensive listing of recent habitat actions. These include design and construction or rehabilitation of spawning channels, removal of non-native vegetation, inventories and assessments of prospective restoration sites, and groundwater investigations. Reintroduction efforts and the use of hatchery programs to augment natural chum populations were also described and are ongoing activities. Additionally, M&E activities are being employed to evaluate the project's habitat restoration, hatchery, reintroduction, and enhancement actions. Run reconstruction of the chum salmon populations is especially important for evaluating VSP criteria. Some objectives have already been achieved, while others are on track to be met. Results from the project will have direct applicability to the Council's 2017 Research Plan as project results directly address questions in the Tributary Habitat, Mainstem, Fish Propagation, Population Structure and Diversity, Climate Change, Human Development, and Monitoring and Evaluation Methods categories of the plan.

A number of improvements in methods have occurred in response to the project's M&E efforts. New procedures are being used to estimate population abundances in tributary and mainstem spawning locations. Methods used to collect and tag adults were changed to reduce stress and enhance the retention of tags used in capture-recapture studies. Methods to mark juveniles produced from the project were changed from strontium and otolith thermal marking to Parentage-Based Tagging (PBT) to increase sample sizes and reduce uncertainty in estimates. Additionally, environmental changes were made to the Duncan spawning channels to increase egg-to-fry survival rates. Changes to broodstock collection locations, fry release numbers, and rearing locations were made in response to project data. All these changes indicate that the program is using adaptive management to refine its actions. For completeness, the program should provide a description of its adaptive management process in its next annual report.

The lessons learned are generally specific to the project. However, the general recovery approach of identifying extant stock structure, determining the limiting factors faced by each population segment, assessing habitat and prioritizing recovery actions has broad application throughout the Basin and beyond.

Annual reports are routinely produced and made available. Project data are made available on many web-based sites, including Coordinated Assessments, Fish Passage Center, Fish Books, NOAA's Salmon Population Summary (SPS) Database, StreamNet, WDFW-JMX, WDFW Hatchery Future Brood, WDFW Salmonid Stock Inventory & SalmonScape, WDFW's Fish Ageing Database, and WDFW's website.

One of the identified threats to the success of this effort is further human development in key chum salmon spawning areas. If not already occurring, we encourage the proponents to work with others in the Basin to establish conservation easements or to use other suitable methods to protect such areas from further development.

3. Methods: Project Relationships, Work Types, and Deliverables

Given the numerous activities in the project, methods are only briefly described in the proposal and readers are referred to more detailed reports and to procedures at the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP) web site. Methods seem appropriate to evaluate success of the chum salmon recovery actions, but the methods were not reviewed by the ISRP in detail. The current monitoring plan is briefly described. Summaries of results to date show that monitoring has been adequate to compare trends in productivity among natural, channel, and hatchery spawners in several core populations.

The genetic identity of broodstock collected at local donor sites outside the target rivers and rationale for their use are not well explained. On the other hand, the decision to translocate all "volunteer adult returns" captured in Duncan Creek to the spawning channel seems sensible as a way to encourage local adaptation within the population.

The project includes one research project to compare the benefits of using adult spawners, releases of fed-fry, and natural straying to maintain, reintroduce, or enhance lower Columbia River chum salmon populations. Formal hypotheses and expected time lines for when this comparison might be completed should be described. However, given the high variation the proponents have documented in R/S values it seems reasonable to assume that it will take three or more generations for this assessment to be concluded.