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14 A Scientific Advisory Board to Address the Salmon Problem
Pages 348-357

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From page 348...
... The topics include, for example, the survival of young fish between dams compared with their survival as they pass through and over dams; the relationship of survival of young fish to the flow rates of water in rivers; the effects on survival of various management practices, including logging, grazing, irrigation, agriculture, and use of hatcheries; the influence of ocean conditions on survival and growth of salmon; the degree to which salmon survival and growth in freshwater and at sea are density-dependent; the effectiveness of transportation and altering flow regimes on dammed rivers in increasing survival of young salmon; the importance of predation in rivers and estuaries in survival of juveniles and adults; the effect of hatcheries on the number of fish returning to spawn, ocean survival, homing ability, and genetic diversity; where and when different populations of salmon migrate in the ocean, and even the status of many populations of 348
From page 349...
... In short, there needs to be more objective scientific guidance and planning for research undertaken within the policy context. The difficulties and controversies surrounding management of riverflows in the Columbia River provide a good example of the importance of objective scientific guidance.
From page 350...
... If policy choices are to be made, the uncertain relationship between salmon welfare and riverflow must be elucidated and must be compared with the economic welfare of human populations that use the river's waters for multiple purposes. Since the late 1970s, when the question of whether flows benefit fish arose (when the completion of the Snake River dams enabled river managers to eliminate spills of water over hydropower dams in most years)
From page 351...
... Army Corps of Engineers and the National Marine Fisheries Service, has been to transport migrating fish; juvenile fish are captured at one or more dams and taken in barges or trucks to below Bonneville, the lowest dam on the Columbia. Transportation is much less expensive because it does not require releasing impounded water in the spring, when power demand is relatively low and the natural supply of water is high because of the snowmelt.
From page 352...
... Gaining reliable knowledge of the relationship between salmon survival and river flows will take a long time; on that, all sides agree. Intense conflict throughout the learning period will inhibit or undermine learning, as already occurred through the 1980s as test fish (fish used for experiments)
From page 353...
... Suppose that an agency developed a management rule based on an explicit hypothesis, say, the hypothesis that increased river flow increases the survival of salmon smelts. One would expect the agency to emphasize protection of endangered populations while testing the effectiveness of alternatives in a reasoned and systematic fashion, making appropriate use of variations in natural conditions to provide experimental variation.
From page 354...
... The difficulty in the hypothesis concerning salmon survival that our hypothetical agency might consider is that controls and replication are both extremely difficult or impossible to achieve. If the volume of river flow is the dominant independent variable, then in large measure nature determines how much water is available to be used by migrating salmon in a given year.
From page 355...
... An independent scientific advisory board could help to insulate the learning process from the defenders of each option for improving survival. Its presence and clear advice would allow the hypothetical agency to obtain an explicit agreement among all parties that inriver flows and spills, transportation, and all other established means of increasing fish survival will continue to be used throughout the period of experimentation unless it becomes clear to the scientific advisory board that the experimental results dictate a different course of action.
From page 356...
... Therefore, to provide enough time to collect and organize data, we encourage scientists, within nine months of the end of the last migration season, to archive a comprehensive data set for each year's studies and make them available to the public at one or more of the region's research universities. We also encourage principal scientists in charge of the experiments to submit a paper or papers reviewing the cumulative experience and scientific findings as often as results warrant; probably at least once every three years.
From page 357...
... Although the advisory board will not and should not make policy decisions, its scientific advice must be loud and clear enough that it cannot be ignored by accident. The operation of a successful scientific advisory board will require substantial money for support and logistics and substantial time of its members and staff.


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