April 7 - Mon. 7 p.m. - Olympia - Another chance for Adaptive Management Area discussion with Forest Service - Supervisor's Office, 1835 Black Lake Blvd.
April 9 - Wed. 7 p.m. - QUAFCO meeting - 210 Taylor, #19 upstairs, Port Townsend
April 15 - Tues. 7 p.m. - Native Plant Society mtg. - Dan Norris on "Role of Bryophytes in Temperate Rainforests" - WSU Cooperative Extension office, Shold Business Park
May 3 & 4 - Sat. & Sun. - Western Washington Forest Conference - Cispus Center near Randle, Wash. - See enclosed registration form - This is the place to be! - Contact QUAFCO for carpooling or financial assistance information - Deadline April 28
Salmon rescue efforts failing, federal biologists warn
A press release distributed by the ForestWater Alliance, dated March 25, states that millions of dollars being spent to save Pacific Northwest salmon are being wasted, according to a new report by senior government biologists.
The report, which will appear in the May edition of the prestigious American Fisheries Society Journal, warns that "fish restoration" projects being implemented across the region are having little effect in bringing salmon populations back from the brink of extinction.
The only solution likely to save the salmon, the report concludes, is "modification of upslope and riparian conditions"--such as logging--"that cause stream habitats to decline," and a planning process that includes a wide range of professions, such as geologists, hydrologists, silviculturalists and engineers.
"Where fish restoration efforts are heading today is unlikely to restore salmon to any appreciable numbers," said U.S. Forest Service fish biologist Jeff Dose, one of the authors of the report.
"If we truly want to restore salmon, we're going to have to make some fundamental changes in land and water use," said Dose. The veteran scientist said efforts to save salmon must shift from projects which focus exclusively on restoring instream habitat, to an approach which seeks to restore the overall health of watersheds.
Most of the state, federal and private money now being spent on salmon restoration projects across the Pacific Northwest is probably being wasted, Dose said.
"There are tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars being expended annually on Pacific Northwest salmon restoration," Dose said. "An awful lot of those expenditures are going to be futile unless we do something different."
One result of the new, whole watershed approach to saving salmon, the report says, will be the realization that "stream restoration in the absence of modification of upslope land management activities (logging, etc.) is likely to be futile."
"We can say with some certainty that the methods and approaches suggested (in the report) are probably the only chance that we have of saving the salmon," Dose said.
"It's extremely urgent that we make these changes now," Dose said. "We are at a crossroads--and perhaps beyond a crossroads in some places, some locales, some river systems, some salmon stocks. Large proportions of our salmon are now extinct, and have gone extinct in the last 50 years or less. And many more are poised to go extinct, or to be diminished to such low levels that they might as well be extinct.
"If we're going to rebuild those salmon runs, we're going to have to make a long-term effort. We have to have the courage and the will to do it as a society. Or else, it will go away. It has happened before. If you look at historical precedents in Europe, there were abundant runs of anadromous salmon and trout, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Ninety-nine percent of those are now extinct--and it happened in a 200- or 300-year period. We could very easily go the same route that they did."
Following are excerpts from the report:
By Brett B. Roper, Forest Fisheries Biologist, Idaho Panhandle National Forest; Jeffrey J. Dose, Forest Fisheries Biologist, Umpqua National Forest; Jack E. Williams, Senior Aquatic Ecologist, Bureau of Land Management
The fisheries profession is playing a key role in planning and implementing stream restoration projects throughout the world. To date, however, few examples exist of effective stream restoration programs or projects ... We suggest that stream restoration would have a greater chance of succeeding if it was planned and implemented at a watershed scale. To do this, stream restoration projects must be expanded beyond instream work to include modification of upslope and riparian conditions that cause stream habitats to decline. In addition, planning of stream restoration at the watershed scale must include other disciplines that better understand these upslope watershed processes.
... One primary reason stream restoration projects have not succeeded is that these projects have generally been implemented on a small-scale, site-specific basis, with little apparent appreciation for an overall theory guiding restoration ecology (Hobbs and Norton 1996). Reliance on tactical, site-specific projects, in the absence of an overall strategic watershed restoration plan has resulted in a low biologic return on at least some, if not most, of the money being spent on stream restoration (Beschta et al. 1992; Frissell and Nawa 1992).
The lack of strategic planning is perplexing in that scientists generally agree on the overall goal of stream restoration: to reconnect fragmented habitats and reconstruct historic ecosystem processes (National Research Council 1992). Far more often, however, stream restoration projects have focused primarily on providing instream structural habitat for fishes, often without addressing the ecosystem processes that originally led to the loss of these instream structural components. This tendency is often fueled by a societal bias towards taking some action, any action, even when there is inadequate environmental baselines or understanding of broader-scale ecological processes (Naiman et al 1995). This myopic approach of focusing on the symptoms rather than causes of ecological degradation must be altered if genuine ecological restoration is to occur...
... To maintain long-term productivity we must first understand that degraded aquatic systems usually result from a combination of degraded instream habitats, degraded upslope conditions (Armour et al. 1991; Frissell 1992), altered hydrologic regimes (Harr and Coffin 1992; Jones and Grant 1996), and changing biotic communities (Karr 1991; Abrams 1996). These altered conditions affect survival of fishes in different ways, resulting in a different composition of these species' life histories or a different suite of species (Schlosser 1991). Therefore, successful restoration must address abiotic and biotic processes within the basin to be successful (Lichatowich et al. 1995).
Understanding the full range of variables affecting stream environments, from landslides to species introductions, requires expertise outside the field of fish biology. By including professions such as silviculture, ecology, range, engineering, geology, hydrology, etc., stream restoration can be built on a broad foundation of knowledge so that restoration at the watershed scale has a greater chance to succeed...
... in many watersheds, while removal of the degrading influence is a necessary first step in the restorative process, this step alone will not be sufficient to foster a complete or even desirable level of restoration (Hobbs and Norton 1996). In these cases the use of active restoration may be necessary to restore stream processes. Active restoration projects in most basins include stream structures, road removal or modification, stabilization of sediment sources, riparian planting, culvert replacements, etc., depending on the antecedent concerns (Doppelt et al. 1993; Williams et al. 1997). The objectives of these active restoration projects should be to move the watersheds towards the structure, function, or composition of the historic ecosystem based on an examination of local disturbance regimes and at several spatial scales. Additionally, restoration actions should not be solely based on the needs of an individual salmon species or life-stage (Bisson et al. 1997).
Because the effects of anthropogenic changes within watersheds are multifaceted and difficult to predict (Hicks et al. 1991; Dose and Roper 1994), successful planning and implementation of active restoration projects must include monitoring of key watershed processes prior to and after project implementation (Bryant 1995). Currently, the attitude of many restoration planners regarding monitoring is similar to the attitude that led to degraded habitat in the first place: an absolute faith that we can modify watersheds in agreement with our notions of what is most fitting, so why monitor the results (Kondolf 1995)? This thinking has slowed the development of effective watershed restoration (Kondolf and Micheli 1995). Only by monitoring specific watershed restoration tactics can their value in an overall watershed restoration strategy be evaluated...
Restoration programs can play key roles in maintaining fish populations into the future. However, to maintain many fish populations a shift in emphasis from restoration based primarily on instream habitat ... to restoration of watershed processes ... will be necessary...
... Fish populations and aquatic habitats have declined precipitously during the past decades. Fortunately, a watershed restoration program predicated on restoring ecological processes at a watershed scale holds substantial promise for reversing these declining trends. The fisheries profession must and will continue to play a lead role in future stream restoration projects. However, at the same time we must realize that properly implementing watershed scale restoration will take more knowledge and effort than our own.
*** Please read the entire article in the May journal or contact QUAFCO for a copy of the report.
The Western Ancient Forest Campaign reminds us that:
Forestry activities usually depend on access by roads. In the Pacific Northwest, each square mile of intensively- managed commercial forest land requires an average of 5 miles of road. Roads directly eliminate natural wildlife habitat, restrict movements of small animals, create edge effects and exacerbate blowdown, contribute massive amounts of sediments to streams in steep terrain, encourage invasions of forest pests and diseases, and reduce habitat effectiveness for many large mammals.
** Road building on public lands, paid for by the U.S. Forest Service with taxpayer dollars, destroys fish habitat and associated industry, threatens water quality, fragments intact ecosystems and threatens endangered species. The National Forest system already contains over 369,000 miles of roads, roughly eight times more than the interstate highway system.
** Protecting roadless areas saves taxpayers money. Road building in roadless areas invariably results in a loss to the federal treasury. Roadless areas have less timber productivity and higher logging costs.
** Money appropriated for road building should be spent instead on the maintenance of existing roads and decommissioning old roads. This will help restore damaged watersheds and restore valuable native fish stocks.
** Protecting roadless areas is consistent with ecosystem management. Roadless areas serve as core areas for preserving biological diversity.
** Protecting roadless areas is the first step in avoiding "environmental train wrecks," by helping offset the pressures on threatened and endangered species that result from inadequate and costly forest management practices.
QUAFCO News April 1997
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