The Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership has a plan for the endangered fish recovery

Another interesting read from The Daily Astorian
Estuary plan includes $500 million for salmon, steelhead recovery Lower Columbia Partnership analysis is open for review
By CASSANDRA PROFITA

Degraded Columbia River estuary habitat is contributing to the decline of endangered species of salmon and steelhead trout, but it is hard to tell how much because so little is known about the complex ecosystem.

Nevertheless the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership (LCREP) has designed a plan for the recovery of the endangered fish.

The proposal that LCREP created is available at NOAA (the sponsoring agency) for public review and comment. You can download the 200 page report here. (It is a 7 MB PDF file so you might want to right-click on that link and save it to read with your next cup of coffee rather than opening it in your browser.) The piece goes on.

"There is general agreement that the estuary ecosystem is degraded and no longer provides the same level of support to native species assemblages that it did historically," the module's executive summary says. "Unfortunately, this field of research is perhaps the least understood, and its impact on salmon and steelhead is not well documented or studied."

The report notes the size of the estuary is about 20 percent smaller than it was when Lewis and Clark camped along the shore. "This reduction in estuary size is due mostly to dike and filling practices used to convert the flood plain to agricultural, industrial, commercial and residential uses," it says.

There has been a 44 percent decrease in spring freshets or floods in the last 200 years, and the flows in the estuary "do not resemble" their historic patterns, according to the report. Hydropower, water withdrawal for irrigation and water supplies and climate fluctuations have all taken their toll on the health of the system, which, in turn, has affected salmon and trout.

Water quality has been degraded by human practices within the estuary and upstream, the document says. Increased water temperatures, by an average of 4 degrees since 1938, and the presence of toxic contaminants are key threats to salmon and steelhead. A study in the estuary linked contaminants to fatal diseases in up to 18 percent of salmon tested.

The report has a number of suggestions for projects to address the little understood problem, including:

"monitoring the estuary for contaminants and restoring contaminated sites...changing main- and side-channel dredging to reduce negative impacts and removing tide gates and jetties and navigational structures that have 'low navigational value but high impact on estuary circulation or juvenile predation effects.' "

Gee, weren't we just talking about dredging?

LCREP Executive Director Debrah Marriott says that she is looking forward to hearing from people. Through the wonders of technology, we can help with that: Send LCREP' email at lcrep@lcrep.org or get the rest of their contact information here.

This report is one of a series of recovery planning “modules” that NOAA's Northwest Region is developing. It looks like those reports will be available here when they are released.

Interesting sidenote: A reader of ours wrote to point out that the increased water useage by industry, water intake for ballast and so on has a serious impact on this problem. Looking at just two proposed facilities -- Bradwood and NorthWest Energy  at Kalama -- the combined water usage will be 6.6 Billion Gallons a Year. And that's just two of the many project proposals that seem to be popping up all over the beautiful Lower Columbia River, where speculators seem bound and determined to turn our river into another ugly, polluted, heavy industrial zone.