• Projects
  • Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program

Breadcrumb

Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) Conservation Biology CB - Mathematical Biology and Systems Monitoring

Information

Project
CHaMP
Title
Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program
Description
The goal of CHaMP is to generate and implement a standard set of fish habitat monitoring (status and trend) methods in up to 26 watersheds across the Columbia River basin. The watersheds have been chosen to maximize the contrast in current habitat conditions and also represent a temporal gradient of expected change in condition through planned habitat actions. Surveys will be conducted in watersheds with perceived large juvenile life-stage survival gaps due to habitat impairments or that are home to existing high quality fish monitoring infrastructure. CHaMP implementation will occur on the spatial scale of the Technical Recovery Team (TRT) populations with the intention for inference on habitat quality and quantity at the fish population level. CHaMP is being built around a single habitat monitoring protocol with a program-wide approach to data collection and management.

Research Themes

Habitats to support sustainable fisheries and recovered populations
Healthy oceans, coastal waters, and riverine habitats provide the foundation for aquatic resources used by a diversity of species and society. Protecting marine, estuarine and freshwater ecosystems that support these species relies on science to link habitat condition/processes and the biological effects of restoration actions. The NWFSC provides the habitat science behind many management actions taken by NOAA Fisheries and other natural resource agencies to protect and recover aquatic ecosystems and living marine resources. The NWFSC also maintains a longstanding focus on toxic chemical contaminants, as a foundation for regional and national research on pollution threats to fisheries and protected resources.

Research Foci

Develop effective and efficient habitat restoration and conservation techniques
Maintaining and re-establishing viability and sustainability of living marine resources requires conservation and rehabilitation or restoration of habitats upon which species depend. Common habitat restoration approaches and tech-niques often presume that habitats are static features of the environment, and that creation of stable habitats is a desirable restoration strategy. However, riverine, nearshore, and marine habitats are created and sustained by dynamic landscape, climatic, and oceanographic processes and biota are adapted to changing habitats that are within the range of natural variability. Hence, current restoration strategies often have limited success, in part because they fail to recognize larger scale processes that drive habitat change, and in part because they fail to recognize intrinsic habitat potential of individual restoration sites. The main goals of this research focus are to: improve understanding of how large-scale processes create diverse and dynamic habitats that support marine and anadromous species, better understand how human activities alter habitat-forming processes and habitats, develop new restoration techniques that are compatible with sustainable habitat-forming processes, and understand the variety of actions needed to adequately conserve intact critical habitats. In addition, NWFSC’s research will improve understanding of how new and existing habitat restoration and protection techniques affect fish and habitat at multiple scales (i.e., reach, watershed, Evolutionarily Significant Unit).

Keywords

habitat
related to fish habitat (terrestrial or marine)
monitoring
Monitoring of strategies and actions intended to recovery salmon populations
salmon
all salmonids

Products

None associated

Taxa

Species Oncorhynchus mykiss
rainbow trout, steelhead trout, syeelhead trout
Species Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
Chinook salmon, king salmon, spring salmon

People

Chris Jordan
Principal Investigator