Not my intent to overstate anything about this study. If I have done that, I apologize. Maybe you are reading more into my post(s) than what's really there.

Many of the so-called "segregated" winter steelhead programs out there are using early-timed Chambers stock as their primary strategy to keep hatchery fish from co-mingling with later timed wild fish. While that strategy seems completely logical, it has gone largely untested in real-life. That's what the investigators set out to study.... and this is what they found. Run-timing alone is not sufficient to prevent significant co-mingling of hatchery and wild populations. The study concludes nothing more and nothing less.

In practical terms, what this shows us is that a number these programs are probably falling well short of the the HSRG benchmark of < 5% hatchery gene flow back to the wild for a properly-run segregated program.