Is habitat restoration targeting relevant ecological needs for endangered species? Using Pacific Salmon as a case study

Abstract

Abstract. Conservation and recovery plans for endangered species around the world, including the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), rely on habitat assessments for data, conclusions and planning of short and long-term management strategies. In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, hundreds of millions of dollars ($US) per year are spent on thousands of restoration projects across the extent of ESA-listed Pacific salmon-often without clearly connecting restoration actions to ecosystem and population needs. Numerous decentralized administrative units select and fund projects based on agency/organization needs or availability of funds with little or no centralized planning nor post-project monitoring. The need therefore arises for metrics to identify whether ecosystem and species level restoration needs are being met by the assemblage of implemented projects. We reviewed habitat assessments and recovery plans to identify ecological needs and statistically compared these to the distribution of co-located restoration projects. We deployed two metrics at scales ranging from the sub-watershed to ESA listing units; one describes the unit scale match/mismatch between projects and ecological concerns, the other correlates ecological need with need treated by projects across units. Populations with more identified ecological concerns contained more restoration effort, but the frequency of ecological concerns in recovery plans did not correlate with their frequency as restoration targets. Instead, restoration projects were strongly biased towards less expensive types. Many ESA-listed salmon populations (78%) had a good match between need and action noted in their recovery plan, but fewer (31%) matched at the smaller sub-watershed scale. Further, a majority of sub-watersheds contained a suite of projects that matched ecological concerns no better, and often worse, than a random pick of all project types. These results suggest considerable room for gains in restoration funding and placement even in the absence of centralized planning. This analytical approach can be applied to any species for which habitat management is a principle tactic, and in particular can help improve efficiencies in matching identified needs with explicit management actions.

Slow climate velocities of mountain streams portend their role as refugia for cold-water biodiversity

“…Resolution of these issues is needed for designing conservation strategies given the high likelihood of climate warming through at least midcentury and significant societal investments (i.e., billions of US$) to preserve cold-water species across broad geographic areas (29). Here, we estimate historical stream warming rates and climate velocities throughout the mountainous northwestern United States where concerns about the region's iconic salmonid fishes and other cold-water species motivated extensive temperature monitoring efforts in recent decades ( Fig.…”

Data system design alters meaning in ecological data: salmon habitat restoration across the U.S. Pacific Northwest

“…This metric of match between need and action is crude and contains a heavy bias toward correctly matching action with need as any relevant project is scored as addressing a need regardless of how small the quantitative investments in that project type may be (Barnas et al 2015). This metric of match between need and action is crude and contains a heavy bias toward correctly matching action with need as any relevant project is scored as addressing a need regardless of how small the quantitative investments in that project type may be (Barnas et al 2015).…”

“…However, actions like fish screens are also distinct in being tied to specific land uses where water withdrawals are occurring (Barnas et al 2015), and so there is at least some implicit location information that structured the project type designations in PCSRF. The PCSRF was established by congress in 2000 as a means by which NOAA Fisheries Service would provide grants to States and Tribes to assist State, Tribal, and local salmon conservation and recovery efforts.…”

Integrating Limiting-Factors Analysis with Process-Based Restoration to Improve Recovery of Endangered Salmonids in the Pacific Northwest, USA

“…Instead, it is in finding the structure, and enforcing the discipline, to follow the guidance of this framework during the recovery-planning process and, ultimately, through on-the-ground implementation [40,45]. This will also require that current reach and watershed assessment guidelines allow more flexibility in their application to specific circumstances.…”

“…Elsewhere, discrete areas where natural processes of river migration and LWM input have been highly constrained would likely benefit from actions to resolve those constraints, rather than simply creating localized habitat features in the absence of long-term processes necessary to sustain them. Though well intentioned, the long-term effectiveness of such habitat construction has generally been found to be rather low, as demonstrated by a variety of studies spanning more than a quarter century (e.g., [39,40]. As such, small-scale habitat-improvement projects provide limited long-term benefit to ecosystem restoration, even though they are the most common products of nearly all such assessments.…”