Asotin Creek has one of the largest, naturally produced and self-sustaining populations of wild steelhead on the eastside of the Cascade Mountains.  The significant number of adult steelhead (>500) and juvenile steelhead (>41,000, or about 1,400 juveniles per mile) in Asotin creek are notable in the Snake River basin, because they have shown a resiliency in the face of habitat degradation and hydrosystem impacts, while other steelhead populations have slipped toward extinction.  Such persistence suggests that the Asotin Creek steelhead population may be at or above VSP thresholds.  In addition, Asotin Creek may be the only stream that can provide reference data for supplementation effectiveness monitoring for steelhead in the Columbia Basin, because it collects the wide array of metrics necessary from a large wild steelhead population to evaluate the effects of supplementation programs.  The main goal of the Asotin Creek Assessment Project is to fully understand the life history of Asotin Creek salmonids, with an emphasis on wild steelhead, which is the focus of the BPA contract for FY08.

The proposed project budget for FY08 was previously set at $100,000 by BPA.  An additional $25,342 was re-instated to the project, bringing the total budget for FY08 to $125,342.  The additional $25,342 is being used for the coming years’ operation of the adult weir and traps for an additional month (i.e., through February 2009), with a 13-month contract period from February 29, 2008 to February 1, 2009.  In addition, we anticipate that full funding will be restored to the project for FY09 by BPA, in response to the Asotin Creek Project's inclusion in the 2007 NOAA Fisheries Biological Opinion (BiOp), which states: “Continue to fund …”; and also in response to the letter sent to BPA on December 19, 2007, by the NPPC requesting full funding for the project in FY09.

Note:  The State of Washington’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board is providing an additional $88,113 in FY08 for continued collection of data from the juvenile steelhead population in Asotin Creek.  This funding will pay for 6 months of staff time, for the operation and maintenance the smolt trap, in order to capture migrating juvenile salmonids for data collection, including the enumeration of juveniles; length, weight, and scales for age structure; and clipping or tagging for trap efficiency testing.  This data will be placed into spreadsheets and an annual report will be produced for the SRB in early 2009.  The SRFB funding will allow for overall data continuity, which is necessary if the project is to generate production measures using estimates from both the adult and juvenile population, e.g., smolt-to-adult ratios [SAR’s] in the future.