Dave,

I make my living as a fisheries biologist in Oregon and have had this title for about 15 years. Not that this gives me any "special" qualifications as we all know "everyone" is a biologist.

It will be interesting to read what your team of experts mention as concerns for salmon and steelhead. Anadromous fishes are complicated by the fact that their survival is dependant upon habitat conditions from emergence in freshwater to adults in the ocean. Unlike a resident fish that lives his entire life in a relative small piece of water these fish require literally thousands of miles of habitat. Any weak link along this line and survival will be reduced at some level.

Water availability, water quality, predation, dam operations, harvest, ocean conditions, etc., have nothing to do with global warming but nonetheless impact salmonid fish in a big way. Seperating these issues from those resulting from "global warming" will be a challenge. For example, most all of our streams and rivers have a hydrograph that looks much different than it would have 150 years ago. Many of our streams are far more "flashy" than they once were as a result of roads, logging, irrigation, headwater storage, municipal consumption, etc. These types of interferences of course change water chemistry and in themselves "mimic" the effects global warming. Less water generally means higher water temperatures.

Assuming our world is warming we would also expect that our mountainous regions will receive less snow. This in itself I would expect will be a bad thing for a salmonid species requiring cool water. Snow is vital because unlike rain it tends to leave the mountain slowly giving salmonid fishes downstream a constant influx of cold water as the day time air temperatures rise. This is only a problem during the summer months and in the end may over time shrink the available summer habitat. Bigger than that will be the impacts we see in the oceans. Ocean conditions more than anything else control the annual adult return variations we currently see. The huge chinook returns we have seen in recent years are a good example. We might like to think the increases are a result of habitat improvements we have made in the headwater and migratory sections but in reality they are primarily ocean driven.

So....will global warming change the migrational route of ocean prey species? Will the compliment of prey species change? Will the abundance of prey change? Will the abundance of competitor species change? Will ocean timing (time when juveniles arrive and adults leave) change? Will adults migrate further north than they do now thereby changing their susceptibility to new fisheries? So many questions with so few answers.

Although I hate to admit it I think the future of salmonid fishes is not good. There is only so much water and so much space for us folks to live in and sadly fish and wildlife species are standing in the "middle of the road" to progress. All of us have seen wetlands disappear, forests turn into homes and favorite fishing holes become more crowded.

On the more positive side of things, however, we are continually learning and people are beginning to accept the fact that we must conserve water, protect wild places, and live more as conservationists instead of consumers. We may find in the future ways to manipulate water temperatures in all of our tributaries...wouldn't that be great? This alone would open hundreds of miles of habitat. We may also find it necessary to manipulate the genetics of these fishes. For example we could develop a salmon that had a fecundity (number of eggs) that was 10 times what our salmon currently have. We might develop a salmon that broadcast spawns like a shad rather than building a "redd" in clean gravel. Perhaps a salmon that could tolerate temperatures like a carp. While we are at it we could also create a chinook that routinely hits 50 lbs or more!
Time will tell.

RM