It's time to stop doing feel good projects and do things that result in demonstrably more fish.

There is a big need to have lots of monitoring. And just the good old fashioned life history monitoring. The watershed I worked on for a while had a lake tributary to the main creek. Where the outlet stream went under 101 the culvert had a drop of a foot or so at most flows. No problem for adult salmonids; blocked cottids, though. But, it was difficult for juvenile coho and steelhead to pass up. Many did, because we saw them in the spring at the smolt trap on the lake.

The lake had largemouth when I was there and then got Northern Pike. After rehabbing, they did not restock the exotics but left it to the natives. The lake's capacity, without the exotic predators, was something north of 30K, which was double what the rest of the watershed could do. We know that coho (especially) and steelhead will seek out these lakes and ponds to overwinter. This gives a big bump in smolt numbers and size. The larger coho smolts were measured as having higher survival.

Part of the recovery effort should be reconnecting access to these lakes and ponds. It's not just expanding spawning distance.