For 20 years the Columbia Basin Bulletin has offered readers in-depth news coverage of Columbia River basin salmon and steelhead recovery, the most extensive and expensive ecological restoration effort in the United States. Your Paid Membership will allow the CBB to continue reporting the important details of Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead recovery and other fish and wildlife issues.
In Oregon’s fertile Willamette River Basin, where two-thirds of the state’s population lives, managing water scarcity would be more effective if conservation measures were introduced in advance and upstream from the locations where droughts are likely to cause shortages, according to a new study.
A new study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego suggests that a new regime of wet and dry extremes is emerging in California and that the projected bolstering of extreme precipitation is likely to be caused by streams of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers (ARs).
Some five to 16 million salmon and steelhead had historically returned to the Columbia River basin, but just an average of two million fish return today and only 40 percent of those are naturally produced stocks. If goals in a new Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force report can be met in the next 50 to 100 years, the number of naturally produced fish could increase by eight-fold.
River temperatures in the tailrace of Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River rose above 67 degrees this week and the air temperature is predicted to rise above 90 degrees this weekend. That prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to increase releases of water from Dworshak Dam to keep Lower Granite tailwater temperature under 68 degrees, partially as an aid to the few adult sockeye salmon expected to return to the Snake River and Sawtooth Basin this year.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind reauthorized WDFW staff to lethally remove wolves from the Old Profanity Territory pack in northeast Washington.
Nearly 18,000 river kilometers (11,185 miles) of Columbia River basin streams currently has suitable habitat for an invasive predatory fish that, as climate warms, is a range that is predicted to increase by 10,000 river miles by 2080, according to a recent study.
