I have mixed feelings about the SCOTUS decision (to leave in place the 9th Circuit decision). Don't get me wrong, I do favor restoring fish habitat. However, not all habitat restoration measures are the same. Not the same in terms of fish species affected. Not the same in the quantity of fish productivity restored. And not the same in terms of quantity of fish productivity restored per dollar, or million dollars spent. And that really bothers me. A billion or two dollars now must be spent under federal court order to restore habitat that in many cases will result in less increase in fish productivity than if that money were spent on more beneficial restoration measures.
The selection of culverts for a habitat court case was strategic. The case area treaty tribes figured that, compared to habitat loss due to urbanization, roads, agriculture, forestry, mining, and hydropower, stream miles of anadromous fish habitat loss due to culvert blockages is the most easily and readily quantified. Easily quantified means even a federal judge who knows nothing about habitat productivity can add and subtract stream miles. Ergo, the now famous culvert case.
In news releases yesterday, Lorraine Loomis, chair of the NW Indian Fisheries Commission is quoted as saying that these culvert fixes will result in hundreds of thousands more salmon available for treaty and non-treaty harvest. That sounds nice, impressive even. Unfortunately it is also nonsense, no offense to Ms. Loomis intended since she is just repeating what someone told her.
According to case notes, there are about 1,000 culverts blocking access to about 1,600 miles of usable habitat. Most of the culverted streams have no more than 2 meters of low summer stream flow width that would provide a rough total of 5,632,000 square meters of salmon habitat that could, emphasis on COULD, produce about 2,816,000 coho smolts, IF, and only IF, that habitat is pretty good quality and less than about 1 or 2% at most, stream gradient. Habitat greater than 4% gradient rapidly approaches zero in terms of coho productivity. So if this habitat is prime coho habitat, it could produce 112,640 additional adult coho, about 40% of which will be needed for spawning escapement, given today's general condition of degraded habitat. And all of this habitat is degraded, or else there wouldn't be a culvert there.
This same 1,600 miles would produce less than one Chinook salmon redd per mile, since these are small streams that are typically not favored by Chinook because of their very small size in late summer, early fall when Chinook spawn. These days, PS Chinook can barely replace themselves, so we would be lucky to see an additional 1,600 Chinook in the case area.
Not to stretch this out too long, but the upshot is that under the very best case scenario, the increased salmon production that could result from fixing or replacing every single one of these culverts is quite small, and certainly less than " . . . hundreds of thousands . . ." of HARVESTABLE salmon and steelhead. And I'll add that evidence of that probable outcome is already known to WDFW and the treaty tribes, since they do NOT plan to increase spawning escapement goals by even one single fish, let alone the additional thousands of spawners that would be necessary to produce these many hundreds of thousands of addtional harvestable fish.
Sg