2024 WA-BC-Idaho Joint Meeting Plenary Session
Returning Home —
Anadromous Fisheries in the Pacific Northwest
Plenary Speakers
The Future of Salmon
Monica Tonasket
Spokane Tribe of Indians
We will kick off the conference hearing from a Tribal Councilwoman, followed by the debut of the short film from the 2022 salmon release into the Spokane River which took place at the 152nd AFS Annual Meeting.
About
Monica Tonasket is an enrolled Member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. She currently serves on the Spokane Tribal Business Council as the Council Secretary. She has 29 years’ experience working in various positions at Casinos, Enterprises and Tribal Government, and 25 years of experience in Supervisory, Managerial and Director Positions. She has spent the majority of her career as a Human Resources Director and Administrative Director for the Spokane Tribe. Monica graduated from Gonzaga University with a Bachelor’s degree in General Studies with a concentration in Organizational Leadership. She serves as a founder and mentor of the Spokane Tribal Youth Council and serves on a variety of boards in the areas of Health, Education, Natural Resources, and Environmental Justice. She is a mother of four children and is very involved with her family and community and enjoys participating in community events
Urgency & Adequacy: Rebuilding Snake Basin Fish Stocks
Jay Hesse & Russ Thurow
Anadromous fish in the Snake River basin are cultural and ecological cornerstones. Their historical ubiquity is well documented, but their contemporary plight and the necessary restorative measures have lacked urgency - this appears to be changing. A vision for restoring these iconic species to healthy and abundant levels was established by a diverse group of sovereign entities and stakeholder parties through the Columbia Basin Partnership (CBP) Phase 2 Report. The National Marine Fisheries Service outlined a suite of actions necessary to achieve the CBP mid-range goals by 2050, which includes breaching of the four lower Snake River dams as a centerpiece action in their Rebuilding Interior Columbia Basin Salmon and Steelhead report. The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, Nez Perce Tribe, State of Oregon, and State of Washington advanced the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative (CBRI) which is being supported by the United States Government Commitments as part of a Stay to long-standing litigation on the Columbia River System Operations. In addition, this presentation will describe the current status of stocks relative to goals. Adult returns of wildorigin Snake Basin stocks in 2023 were; ~7,500 spring/summer Chinook salmon, ~15,000 steelhead, ~9,000 fall Chinook salmon, and < 100 sockeye salmon). With the exception of fall Chinook salmon, all were well below even the lowest management threshold required for ESAdelisting and also resulted in many populations at or below quasi-extinction thresholds (50 or fewer spawners). Hatchery-origin returns make up a vast majority of the total number of salmon and steelhead returning to the Snake River basin, however hatchery-origin returns continue to be below their mitigation goals (i.e. not meeting promised compensation for hydro-system impacts). Consistently achieving adequate returns of anadromous fish into the Snake River basin requires a shift in focus from one of not increasing failure risk (jeopardy standard) to one of achieving success (healthy and abundant).
About
Jay Hesse is the Director of Biological Services for the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management; and has worked for the Nez Perce Tribe for 30 years. He helps manage the Tribe’s Research Division, a team of over 60 staff, working on fish population status and trends monitoring and hatchery evaluation projects. His recent work assignments focus on hydro-system operations, including development of the 2019-2021 Spill Operations Agreement. Mr. Hesse has expertise in anadromous fish population dynamics, hatchery effectiveness research, strategic planning, effective communications and multi-entity collaboration. He provides technical and management representation for the Nez Perce Tribe in multiple Columbia River basin fisheries co-management forums. Mr. Hesse served as president of the Idaho Chapter of the American Fisheries Society (2016-2017) and is recipient of the John Robertson Award for outstanding leadership. He routinely mentors students and has co-authored multiple peer reviewed publications, including the recent Water Biology and Security article “A review of poten- tial conservation and fisheries ben- efits of breach- ing four dams in the Lowe Snake River.” Mr. Hesse graduated from Michigan State University with Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Fisheries and Wildlife.
Russ Thurow is an Emeritus Fisheries Scientist with the US Forest ServiceRocky Mountain Research Station. He has fisheries degrees from the Univ. of Wisconsin - Stevens Point and the University of Idaho. For more than 40 years, he has been investigating wild Snake River basin salmon and steelhead. Russ is intimately familiar with Central Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River basin and its remarkable aquatic resources.
How cold-water fishes survive summer in warm river basins: examples of adaptive capacity from Oregon
Jonathan Armstrong
Large river basins exhibit a variety of thermal regimes, which in turn present different challenges and opportunities to mobile poikilotherms, such as fish. For cold-water taxa such as salmonids, physiologically optimal temperatures expand and contract across landscapes throughout the annual cycle. In this talk I explore how fish track this shifting mosaic of physiological potential, and I focus specifically on how trout in large rivers cope with warm summer temperatures through three tactics: move, migrate, or tolerate. I will share the results of field studies in the Willamette and Klamath river basins that show a diversity of responses that will likely confer adaptive capacity in the face of climate warming.
About
Jonathan Armstrong grew up in Southern Oregon, then went on to do his graduate research in Bristol Bay Alaska, working with the University of Washington Alaska Salmon Program. He was awarded a Smith Conservation Research Fellowship to conduct post-doctoral studies at the University of Wyoming and then joined the faculty at the OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences in 2016. Armstrong’s research group works at the nexus of physiological ecology, animal behavior, and landscape ecology to advance climate adaptation planning.
Linking concepts of adaptive capacity to trout and salmon in the Pacific Northwest
Christopher Caudill
Assessing ecological and evolutionary effects across multiple scales remains a key challenge to predicting the response of populations to environmental change. Adaptive capacity is an emerging concept in climate change science that considers how biological and human systems interact in the face of altered environments to allow populations to persist (or not). I will present: 1) a framework for synthesizing concepts of adaptive capacity from several disciplines; 2) summarize our recent work on redband trout attempting to identify key drivers of adaptive capacity from genomic to social-ecological system (SES) scales; and 3) provide two case studies on ESA-listed salmon and steelhead that illustrate biological and management elements of adaptive capacity. The studies highlight the potential for ecological-evolutionary feedbacks and the importance of identifying the relative role of genetic, phenotypic, and environmental factors that may ameliorate impacts of changing climate at local scales. While dams and reservoirs have strong negative impacts to native salmonids, several past and on-going efforts contribute to adaptive capacity in warming landscapes. Recent modeling approaches in the current age of ‘Big Data’ provide the opportunity for unprecedented
About
Chris Caudill is faculty in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences at the University of Idaho where he has studied anadromous fish migration, aquatic ecology and environmental change using interdisciplinary approaches since 2003. In recent years, he has co-led a large multidisciplinary effort funded by NSF and Idaho-EPSCoR to integrate studies from genomic to watershed to social-ecology-systems scales in resident redband trout populations of Idaho. He continues to pursue the application of molecular and modeling approaches to conservation and management issues in aquatic systems.
Exceptionally high mortality of migrating adult female salmon: a large-scale pattern and a conservation concern
Scott Hinch
Sex ratios are fundamental to the demographics and characteristics of populations yet factors responsible for observed sex ratios on salmonid spawning grounds are rarely examined. Historically, female sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) were the majority on Fraser River spawning grounds, but in recent decades, there has been a decline in the relative proportion of females in several populations. Differential mortality between sexes in spawning sockeye salmon is believed to originate during or after their anadromous ocean life. Coincident with the decline in proportion of females on spawning grounds has been large changes to oceanic, estuarine and river migration environments. Over the past 30 years, numerous telemetry tracking and laboratory studies from our group have examined mortality of adult Fraser River sockeye salmon during their freshwater homing migrations. We reviewed 19 published studies which provided 40 situations where male and female mortality could be directly compared during riverine homing migrations. Female mortality averaged 2.1 times greater than males, and up to 8-fold higher in some cases. High female mortality was also evident in migrating coho (O. kisutch) and Chinook salmon (O. tshawytscha), as well as for sockeye in other non-Fraser systems. Female mortality was highest when migration conditions were challenging (e.g. high / turbulent flows, high temperatures, fisheries gear escape, confinement and/or handling), and towards the end of river migration. There are indications that differential mortality could be caused by energy exhaustion, physiological stress, and/or pathogens, but strong evidence suggests cardiac performance may be the key factor. Relatively higher migratory female mortality is probably a common phenomenon in salmonids during challenging migrations, but has been difficult to study. Our findings from the largest salmon producing river in Canada raises concerns for the long-term sustainability of wild migratory salmonids everywhere, and we encourage research into how global change could be affecting sex-specific mortality in other fish species and regions. Given the pace of climate-change induced riverine warming, female-specific mortality will certainly become more pronounced in coming years.
About
Dr. Hinch is a Professor and Associate Dean in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia where he leads the Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Laboratory (https://www.pacificsalmonecologyconservationlab.ca/). He is an expert in the field of fish migrations, ecophysiology and behavioral ecology and is the Pacific leader of Canada’s Ocean Tracking Network. He pioneered the field of conservation physiology in salmon. His current work utilizes telemetry tracking and genomic transcriptome approaches to examine behaviour and mortality of smolts and adults during their coastal and riverine migrations, the effects of migration obstacles (dams, high temperatures, and fisheries gear encounters) on adult salmon, and the role that pathogens, disease and climate change has on these migration issues. He works closely with fisheries managers so that research results can be readily applied and has served on several federal investigations into declining salmon stocks. In collaboration with social scientists, he is investigating ways that science and knowledge can be more effectively mobilized by stakeholders and decision makers. He has authored ~ 300 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, has been cited >20,500 times, and has an h-index of 81. He has trained 70 MSc and PhD students, and 30 PDFs and Research Associates. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Fisheries Society (AFS), has been awarded the AFS Award of Excellence (their highest award), and the AFS Award in Fisheries Education. He is also a Distinguished University Scholar, UBC’s highest honour for researcher.
Please direct questions about the meeting format or meeting theme to Idaho President-Elect Lauren Andrews president-elect@idahoafs.org or WA-BC President-Elect Sean Simmons sean@anglersatlas.com.