Research, Monitoring & Evaluation:
Research, monitoring and evaluation (RM&E) is a key component of successful salmon recovery planning and adaptive management. The NOAA Fisheries Service Northwest Regional Office and Northwest Fisheries Science Center have completed a conceptual framework on monitoring, Adaptive Management for Salmon Recovery: Evaluation Framework and Monitoring Guidance (PDF 304KB). This framework is intended to help recovery planners and others working on salmon and steelhead recovery in the Pacific Northwest with two crucial tasks: gathering the right information and then using it effectively. The research, monitoring, and evaluation programs associated with recovery planning need to gather the information that will be most useful in tracking progress and assessing the status of the listed species. Planners and managers can then use the information to guide and refine recovery strategies and actions. This framework offers conceptual-level approaches, not specific instructions, to these two basic functions.
Modules:
NOAA Fisheries Service believes it is critically important to base Endangered Species Act recovery plans for salmon on the many state, regional, tribal, local, and private conservation efforts already underway throughout the Northwest region. Local support for recovery plans by those whose activities directly affect the listed species, and whose actions will be most affected by recovery requirements, is essential.
This approach, however, has raised its own set of challenges. Among these is the question of how to treat system effects that transcend the geographical boundaries of individual sub-basins and recovery domains.
The geographic location of some domains is such that locally developed plans are able to address the full life cycle of salmonids within those domains. Examples include Puget Sound, the Oregon Coast and the Lower Columbia Washington Management Unit. However, the local plans for those domains located further upriver in the Columbia Basin can address just a limited portion of each ESA-listed salmon or steelhead population’s life cycle, such as tributary habitat. Therefore recovery strategies for those evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) must also consider the effects of activities occurring system-wide. This in turn requires consistent policy and management treatment when those actions affect multiple domains.
The Northwest Region is developing a series of recovery planning “modules” to deal with this situation. These modules address the effects of activities that occur outside of each sub-basin and domain, or that address regional policy issues. The intent is for each local plan to include or incorporate by reference the applicable set of modules within each domain recovery plan.
The purpose of the modules is to ensure consistent treatment, across individual domain plans, of effects from human activities and natural incidences occurring outside of the domain, and to clarify policies applicable to multiple domains.
